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where I could live out my days in loved-up luxury, never having to work again. This sounds ridiculous now, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but I was so convinced that that was how my life would turn out, I didn't even bother to get a proper job.

Can you believe that?

God. Just awful. I was stagnating as a shop assistant in a sweater shop in a back street in Hove, praying for my prince to arrive, spending hours mindlessly folding sweaters and daydreaming about the great love of my life.

But then, much as Born Again Christians find Jesus, I found work. The sweater shop went under (no surprise, given they only had about ten customers the entire year I worked there), and I was left high and dry, with no sign of Prince Charming. I joined a temp agency and they sent me off to work for a local radio station. Ten months filing, making teas and coffees, showing guests from the green room (a cramped airless cubbyhole with an L-shaped filthy sofa that I swear was just huge bits of foam that were covered in fabric, a scratched glass coffee table with a few outdated copies of Billboard magazine, and an ashtray that was permanently overflowing) to the studio. Very very occasionally we'd get someone famous and exciting, but most of the time it was struggling bands who were on a university tour, or some town dignitary involved in a local dispute.

After ten months I was taken under the wing of one of the producers. Robert. It helped that I was sleeping with him, and even though I had grown very tired of him after a month, I carried on because, really, one had to think of the career.

Frankly, I've always said the old methods are best, and what's older, or better, than the casting couch? I proceeded quickly from all-round dogsbody to assistant producer on Robert's afternoon show. A few months later Robert left to join another, rival radio station, on the understanding that I would go too, continue as his assistant, and continue our desktop fucking sessions. I bade him farewell—the plan being I would leave a month later, just so no one would suspect—and ran straight down the corridor to the boss's office.

I don't think anyone was surprised that Robert's shoes were a perfect fit, and although Robert was understandably pissed off, I heard that it wasn't long before he found another nubile young dogsbody to train.

Making the jump from radio to television was easy. Admittedly I had to start almost at the bottom again, but by that time I had a few years and a few schemes on my fellow researchers, and again, it didn't take long. That time I didn't even have to sleep with anybody.

Although I probably would have done. The boss at the TV station will have to remain nameless, but he was extremely attractive, extremely funny, and extremely married. Just my type, except for the marriage bit of course. Maybe you're surprised. I know some of my friends are. They think I'm “prime mistress material,” particularly given my aversion to any kind of emotional attachment.

But I lived through that with my mum. Lived through the pain of a divorce, and I really don't think I could do that to another woman. Of course I have had the odd fling with an Unavailable, I'd be lying if I painted myself as an angel, but, generally, the flings I had, I didn't know anything about a wife. I'd only find out later, and by that time I would have moved on anyway.

I'm not a marriage-wrecker, you see. I never wanted anything from the men I slept with who belonged to someone else, and I'd never be stupid enough to fall for someone and daydream about him leaving his sad and dowdy wife for glamorous old me.

I am neither that stupid nor that self-deluded. I only appear glamorous because of my red hair, and even that isn't, ahem, entirely natural, although that's not something I make a habit of telling people, and my great-grandmother did come from Cork so I can just about get away with it. I've even been known to adopt an Irish accent from time to time, despite having grown up in West Sussex, but I only do that if there's no one Irish around because it isn't very good and I'd be caught out pretty damn quickly.

But it's amazing how fast you can proceed up the career ladder if your