started a Twitter account called Bougie London Literary Woman. We'd been thinking about doing it on and off for a while, but November was cold and boring enough to actually spur us into action – plus I was going over for dinner anyway. My friend roasts a chicken every Sunday for her housemates because she's a mean cook and also a saint.
I'd been living abroad, but before that my friend and I used to spend our evenings staying up too late drinking tea, and inventing characters for fun. It's difficult to explain why we do this, but we do. I guess that's the nature of close friendship: you do odd things together. One such character was born out of the question: “What if the essence of the band Belle and Sebastian was incarnated into male human form, and what would it be like if that man was your boyfriend?” The answer is: awful, in short. He would do things like turn up an hour late to dinner with your parents because he was upset about seeing a dead bird, or claim to be learning Catalan. Bougie London Literary Woman, or Clarissa as she was originally called, was this character's best friend, a woman on whom he had an extremely obvious crush that made you, as his girlfriend, uncomfortable.
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