Frieze Week Diary: Will my marbles be the first to go, or my liver?

This diary first appeared on Apollo Magazine’s website.

Monday, 13 October

There was something weird in the London air, and it wasn’t the rain. E-mails from PRs were hitting my inbox like the salvo from a battery of Gatling guns, and I’d already bumped into one art critic on the point of nervous collapse.

‘Just. Don’t,’ she shot at me when I asked her about all the launch parties I wasn’t invited to. So here we were: on the verge of Frieze, waiting for the ice to break. By the end of tomorrow, art dealers, PRs and journalists would be running screaming through the streets of central London, from Regent’s Park to the river. Gossip would become stronger currency than the Swiss franc.

Complain all you want about Frieze and its satellite fairs – and believe me, I will – but we love it all really. For us art world parasites, it’s the one time of the year when anyone bothers to suck up to us.