I ask Sam Fox, once Peter Foster's girlfriend, what she thinks of him now. She had sent him a lawyer's letter when he tried to get in touch. "What a banker," she says. Well, nearly
Monday. Dale Winton's wedding in the garden of a country-house hotel. Surrounded by dozens of television cameras and heavies from OK! magazine, a flock of minor celebrities gathered amid doves and drifting bubbles, with Cilla as best man wearing a bucket-shaped hat only slightly less disastrous than the one she bought for the Blind Date wedding. The bride, a blonde model famous for saying nothing in an Australian jungle, smiled bravely on, looking as bemused as the rest of us. Dale was deep brown and wispily frail - on the Atkins diet, he said. He's pleased with the result, but I thought he proved that you can be too tanned and too thin.
Wednesday. The Labour gala dinner at the Hilton. As a floating voter who has drifted to Blair, I felt like an agnostic attending a Mass. Tony spoke well, without a note. Cherie looked elegant. A Downing Street lady said to me: "When Tony came to power, he had a whole team looking after him, checking every detail. Cherie had nobody. Suddenly this shy woman had a public image to worry about. No wonder Carole Caplin became so important in her life, like a sister." Carole clearly has great taste in clothes, but as the conman Peter Foster proved, she also has terrible taste in men.
Thursday. The 700th Foyles Literary Lunch - roast lamb at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane. Among the guests of honour (sadly, not speaking) was Sir Patrick Moore, the starriest of them all. My favourite story about Sir Patrick was of the day a typhoon followed him into a curry restaurant in Selsey, blasted through the front window and out through the back, leaving him and his astronomer companion cowering under a table. Sir Patrick often has the look of a man struck by a typhoon, but today he was in his party best. The other story cherished in the industry is of a fly that buzzed too close to him as he described the sky at night. Sir Patrick opened his mouth to speak, the fly buzzed in, and viewers watched in suspense as he decided whether to swallow or spit. A lesser man might have hesitated. Without a tremor he bit, and gulped. He'd be terrific in the jungle.
Later at the Sony Radio Awards - same hotel, different lamb - I meet Sam Fox, the glamour model and pop star who was once Peter Foster's girlfriend. I ask her what she thinks of him now. She reveals that he did try to get in touch with her again but she brushed him off with a lawyer's letter. "What a banker," she said. Well, nearly.
Friday. To the new play starring Matthew Perry and Minnie Driver, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, at the Comedy Theatre, with my family. They adored it. Alas, at the end of a hard week the theatre became as cosy as a womb, warm, dark, velvety, with soothing distant voices. My eyelids closed. How sad to be at a stage in life when not even sexual perversity keeps you awake.
Saturday/Sunday. Two birthday parties. Sir Nicholas Winton ("the British Schindler") celebrated his 94th birthday by going up in a microlight. Seeing him being strapped on to a motorbike with a sail like a large paper dart was worrying. But he landed safely, and said it was nothing compared with flying upside down in a Tiger Moth and held in only by his shoulder straps in 1942. Sir Nicholas saved a generation of Czech Jewish children from death in Auschwitz and many survivors were at his party. One said that at 15, her parents had given her the choice of escaping on one of the trains Winton had organised or staying with them. At the last moment her father insisted she must leave them and go to England. She is the lone survivor; all the rest of her family were wiped out.
Then to Dr Raj Persaud's 40th birthday party at the Savile Club. In his speech he recalled his first television appearance, brand new and nervous, giving advice on a Richard and Judy phone-in. A viewer rang to ask why her husband had suddenly developed a fetish for her whenever she was bent over the kitchen sink, washing up in her Marigolds. Persaud's mind went blank, but Richard told the viewer: "Obviously your husband must have spent his working day being bullied and made to feel inadequate, so the sight of his wife subservient and housewifely instantly turned him on." I asked Raj if anyone had noticed that the collapse in marriage and the rise in the divorce rate exactly mirrored the growing popularity of the washing-up machine? Could Marigolds and a pinny have been the original Viagra?
Sunday. Michael Parkinson's Sunday Supplement on Radio 2 was to review my first novel, so I arrived at noon at Broadcasting House. Parky emerged from the studio looking cuddly in tweed jacket and checked shirt. We sat either side of the microphone and, as he listened to Billie Holiday and Jack Jones, he snapped his fingers to the music and hummed tunelessly. You wouldn't think that being imprisoned every Sunday morning in a radio studio would be a treat for anyone, but Parky seemed happier than ever. I told him so. He said it's because he loves making radio. Television is different, much more tense and complex. He teased me about the way I describe the TV industry in my novel, especially all the bonking. Never happened on any programmes he ever worked on, he said. Poor Parky.
Esther Rantzen's debut novel, A Secret Life, is published by Century (£12.99)
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