“Don’t you know your upper- class lavatorial nursery slang? One just can’t have a drink called Number Two’s.”Relentless shopping in Hamleys and Toys ‘R’ Us has made me wonder what can be going on in the heads of little girls these days. The only person of interest my friends met was one of the chaps from AG Carrick, purveyors of that clean-living “Duchy Originals” brand of biscuits and wine. You must have come across them: the former are frightfully healthy, wheat-germy things, the latter are slugs of non- alcoholic herbal fruit cup misleadingly packaged in wine bottles and christened Duchy Number One (mostly fennel-tasting) and Duchy Number Three (raspberry and redcurrant). No, Jonathan Dimbleby was not there (though his publisher was), nor Tiggy Legge-Bourke nor Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, nor any other double-barrelled fun-lover you might be thinking of. Some swanky friends of mine were invited, however, last week.

It was a reception given by Il Principe to thank various people who’d been, ahem, especially helpful to him in the last year. All right, I get invited to this publishing shindig or that office romp, but am I asked to whoop it up at St James’s Palace? Am I hell. I think we’d all like to own a Paul Gaisford print on which is written “Thanks for another fabulous night, The Duchess of York”.The party season is swinging along nicely, but me, I’m seething with jealousy. But some went too far: “One youth said, ‘Could you put, “To Christine, I’m sorry about last night, it won’t happen again”?’ And then I had to sign this ‘Alan Bennett’ …”This is surely where Fergie could make a mark. The lugubrious playwright, writing in the 1996 Waterstone’s Desk Diary, remembers his discomfiture in the past when book buyers solicited his autograph.

Some wanted him to put “To Madge”, some “To Mum”, above his signature, which was OK. I found her just inside the door of the Roy Miles gallery in fashionable Bruton Street, where an exhibition of the work of Paul Gaisford (proceeds to Children in Crisis) was being launched with full party honours. Why even one of the autumn’s most praised novels, Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang, about the adventures of incompetent robbers in the south of France, is being advertised with the trumpeted line: I rob, therefore I am.
So relax, Simon Stealing books apparently isn’t stealing any more. Posters, prints, Gaisford originals, all received La Duchesse’s signature, thus easily doubling the value of each.I only hope she does not fall into a practice adopted by Alan Bennett. Fergie was sitting at a desk signing – I suppose one should say countersigning – copies of the artist’s work with her distinctive hoyden flourish.