If you run with the pack, you need not bark but wag your tail you must. Russian proverb. For 23 years, I was literary editor, and later also film critic, of the London Evening Standard. A dreamy job — getting paid well to read books and watch movies and then tell people what I thought about them? It definitely beat working on a battery chicken farm, which is what I had done for my gap year.
To every ointment, a fly, though. It was a requirement of my role to appear suitably excited about prizes. The Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. And then, later, the Oscars, the Baftas, the Golden Globes. Round and round they came, year after year. For the first five years or so, they were a novelty and I was genuinely curious about them, actually invested in who won and who lost. They seemed important, even.
