Lucy Gordon started out as the heroine of a fictional column I wrote for my local paper through the late nineties, following her fortunes house-sharing with a bunch of friends, sampling her mother’s ambitious Masterchef recipes, trying to stay on the right side of her boss Slave Driver at Widgetex, lusting after sexy vet and neighbour Big Mike, and turning a blind eye to boyfriend Greg’s many shortfalls. It was originally written in diary form, that old faithful fictional staple, but Bridget Jones had been such a huge recent hit that I wanted to move away from Lucy looking like a rip off in jodhpurs, so I changed it to emails, notes, letters, answerphone messages etc for the book version.

Trivial fact: There are more than a hundred Lucy columns following on from those used for this novel, and she had a very different happy ending by the time I stopped writing it.