Buscopan

Right up until we left to go to my friend's 60th last night, my stomach was giving me hell. I really didn't feel well enough to go to a party at all, but didn't want to let her down and besides, she has lots of interesting friends - poets, photographers, musicians, actors (Peckham is a very arty place these days) - who I was dying to meet.

Shortly before we left, I went through my pill cupboard in desperation and found three Buscopan tablets (for IBS) lurking in a packet. I took one and we set out, me still clutching my stomach through my sequinned flower-power skirt from Joe Brown's (www.joebrowns.co.uk for all clubbers, surfers and hippies of any age, especially if you're looking for purple tights!).

It's 25 miles from Hillingdon to Peckham. An hour later we had only covered ten of them. The traffic was one bonnet to bumper crawl. As the Brentford off-ramp loomed, we made the decision to turn for home, as the jam continued as far as the eye could see. Around the same time, I realised that my stomach ache had gone. When we got home, two hours after setting out, I decided 'waste not, want not', opened the bottle of fizzy M&S rose wine I had been taking to my friend's and slung a pizza in the oven. We ate around ten, Mr G went to bed around 11 and I stayed up till one, drinking, watching crap TV and reading The Intelligencer by Leslie Silbert, a fascinating crime thriller that jumps between Christopher Marlowe's spying career in the 16th century, to the present day.

At 3.30 am, I woke from a deep, dream-filled sleep to hear, "Meeeeeeeow!" at the bedroom door. Poor old Felix has a bad leg and is limping, so Mr G kindly left him asleep upstairs in my study and now he had decided it was breakfast time. I hauled my dozy carcase out of bed and fed him some cat bics, crawled back and was still awake when our little feathered friends started piercing my eardrums with their tweets. Then I slung some Benilyn down me and didn't wake again till the doorbell went at twenty past ten.

I guess this might be turning into the diary of a drug addict, but my stomach is OK this morning and I'm going to get in some more Buscopan as it appears to have worked a miracle. I can't imagine where those three pills came from. Maybe my goddaughter passed them onto me as she has stomach trouble, too. In fact, she and I seem to suffer from identical complaints which, as she is 30 years younger than me, is no fun for her. Still, she's off to Vancouver soon, so I am in deep envy.