The solitary bliss of writing a book only lasts as long as the creative process. Once done and dusted, the inevitable task of publicising your forthcoming work gets under way. The delights of Richard and Judy and breakfast TV await, but before that, magazines and Sunday supplements - not to mention Dogs Today and Gay Times (couldn't they just merge?) - need to have a go at you too.
Thus I spend ten hours in the Sky lounge of the City Inn Hotel, where a succession of feature writers is each allowed to spend an hour alone with me. I give them all extended eye contact and toss them the same scraps of exclusive bons mots ten times over. It's good to appear shy in these interviews, then they won't call you difficult and reticent.
My private life, I'd have them believe, consists of walking the dog listlessly around Regent's Park and wiping down surfaces with a damp Spontex. "I have a squirt and a wipe in the kitchen most mornings," I say with as straight a face as a renowned homosexual can muster.
Surprising as it may seem, I do warm to the occasional journalist and have a laugh. A nice woman from the Times so enchanted me that I made the unprecedented offer to interview me in my private, luxury, celebrity home. Two off-duty firemen were busy freshening up my hallway when she arrived, so she walked sideways and clambered over stepladders and jumbo pots of Georgian White paint. (I'm going through a muted phase.)
"I thought you could start the article by saying what a tight squeeze my passage was," I said. "If you like," she replied obligingly. My kinda journo.
To Swindon for Easter with the folks. Gave Auntie Tess (92) a copy of my book. "Just look at the pictures. It's not suitable reading for a woman of your maturity," I said. "Thank you, my dear," she said, then resolutely sat reading all afternoon.
I held my breath when she got to the bit where I perform a sex act on a glass collector in a Sheffield nightclub, but she didn't keel over, just blinked a couple of times and turned the page, looking slightly pale. I took the dog for a walk. You write a book for strangers to read, not relatives. I've written things in A Young Man's Passage that I'd never actually say.
Later I pick up the Mills and Boon romance she's discarded in favour of my offering. It's called My Lady English by Catherine March: "He scooped her up into his arms and carried her to the bed. Placing her down gently he knelt beside her, looming large and powerful and masculine as he eyed her delicate body. Then he lay down and his hand slid between her knees." Me and Auntie Tess: we both know what we like.
Someone who wears her hair in a bun called Val Hennessy reviewed my book in the Mail. She began by stating that she wouldn't get a Clary joke "if it crept up my dress and bit me on the chest". Judging from the photo, it's a long time since anyone did that. My account of my life is dismissed in seven words: "The sad story of a beautiful loser." Strewth. If I'm a loser, what does that make her?
Saturday evening I spent channel-hopping between Graham Norton on Strictly Derivative Dance Fever and news bulletins about the demise of the Pope. Either way, I conclude, there will be an embalming soon.
There has been an unfortunate development. Inevitably, just as I need to be carefree and confident, I have fallen in love with someone unsuitable and probably unattainable. This is nature's way of ensuring I give wistful and pensive interviews, a comedian challenged to conduct himself as a worthy member of his profession. I shall do my best. The anguish will be weeded out and the public need never know.
Fortunately, being a (well, just about) modern gay man, I can be fairly sure that the potency of my emotions will be short-lived. I shall be right as rain in 48 hours. My book sales depend on it. If Dogs Today would only offer me their cover I could retire a happy man.
A Young Man's Passage by Julian Clary has just been published by Ebury Press
