The Girl With All The Hairy Poems

My lasting memories of doing live radio:

not being able to find the building, walking up and down Marylebone High Street in despair and having to have a cup of tea in a cafe called Marco Polo to calm down;

realising the building was, er, right next door to Marco Polo;

being offered about ten million glasses of water once inside;

meeting Amy Blakemore again, being incredibly nervous together but both grateful to have someone to be nervous with;

Mr Gee, Russell Brand's resident poet on his Radio 2 show (I didn't know Russell Brand had a resident poet...) giving us handy tips such as, "Don't EVER pause. Even if you can't think of anything to say just keep talking and think of something to say WHILE YOU'RE SPEAKING" which sounded impossible;

Mr Gee also being annoyingly snide about FYP: "So this FOYLES thing, what was the prize? Book tokens, was it?";

once inside the recording room place, wearing silly headphones and Tessa Dunlop running around with apparently no idea what was going on;

TD's first question, to me: "Would you vote for a politician with GREY hair or BROWN hair?" and me thinking, "What??" and continuing to think, "What??" while saying something stupid which my brain has happily forgotten;

having to answer questions about what it's like to be a teenager and universities and parents and boyfriends and that kind of thing, which was kind of tedious but TD was being all chatty and funny and hyper so it didn't seem so bad;

Amy reading out her (fantastic) poems;

reading Labyrinths and then being asked to read it again because I hadn't explained it before I read it, so they wanted to hear it twice to be able to understand it (that was a bit weird); realising halfway through reading Strawberry Blonde that both my poems were about hair - complete accident; thinking that if anyone remembered me from this it would be as Hair Poem Girl or The Girl With All The Hairy Poems or something similar;

doing my usual thing of raving about Foyle/Arvon/the others and them looking slightly terrified at my enthusiasm;

afterwards everyone running around being all, "Yes yes that was fantastic you MUST contact us if you ever need anything look here's my email write to me anytime you need anything darling" - bollocks, obviously - and Tessa Dunlop as I was walking out the door saying, "And look darling, don't worry if you don't get into Cambridge, Oxford was the worst three years of my life, those places compLETEly fuck you up, you know - WRITE to me! Cheerio!" which I took as an interesting piece of advice. (Incidentally, I have an offer from Manchester - ABB. Which is doable.);

looking for Dad, who was supposed to be giving me a lift home, outside and finding him with a massive red weeping eye and screaming, "Oh my God, have you been mugged???" - he just had conjunctivitis. Which I now have.