Vodka, kaolin and morphine: my welcome drinks at The Spectator offices

In 2001, aged 44, I was hired to write a weekly column for this august paper, and for the first time in my life there was a London door on which I could knock or ring, at any time of the day or evening, and be welcomed in. And what a door! To walk along the Regency terrace sun trap of Doughty Street in Bloomsbury on a summer evening, then breeze through the open door of number 56, and to know that the people to be found inside were the funniest, cleverest, most unsnobbish collection of individuals, and that booze was the second language, was a dream come true.

I would trot up the steps beneath the stripy awning, enter the magic portal and turn left into a seedily ornate reception room. There I could take a running jump into secretary Ann Sindall’s ample bosom. Then I might step over the Dandie Dinmont belonging to raven-haired publisher Kimberly Fortier (who, it was said, had convinced home secretary David Blunkett that she was blonde) and mount the narrow carpeted staircase to the editorial floor above.

‘What about a drink?’ said Mary Wakefield on one of these early wide-eyed visits to Doughty Street, after I’d plonked myself down beside her workstation for a natter. She reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of her desk, showing about 100 vodka miniatures. I nodded complicity. She emptied four into two plastic water cups. ‘Have you got anything to go with it?’ I said, which wasn’t very Low Life-like of me. She reached down and pulled out the lower drawer of her neighbour’s desk and rummaged in it, emerging eventually with a medicine bottle of kaolin and morphine. Perfect! Don’t shake it! Cheers!

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After we’d drunk vodka, kaolin and morphine for half an hour, she resumed her editing as little discommoded in mind and spirit as if we’d shared an afternoon pot of Darjeeling tea.