Nevertheless, once our car drove us up to the famed red carpet, I took my husband's arm and strode up the stairs, and ... with some two hundred photographers on either side, not a single flashbulb went off. I might have been the popcorn vendor.

Breakfast was on me. Hung over, Jeff barely touched his stone-cold eggs. I had half of a miniature jelly doughnut. Total: 56 euros. And the coffee sucked.

Writers in Film World are extras. Moreover, wandering around the dazzling marquees and snaking queues of fans the next day, I realised that literature enjoys no equivalent hoopla. In comparison to Cannes, the London Book Fair is a church social.  

Feature film may be under strain lately, but it still involves money that dwarfs publishing's outlay into chump change. Writers sometimes inspire movies, but the movie is cultural king. A hardback makes a respectable showing when it sells 10,000 copies, while a film counts its audience in the millions.

Yet I returned from France with a renewed sense of calling. I have the job I want. Explaining the difficulties of filming one (very funny) scene in Kevin, in which the mother is so desperate for relief from her screaming infant that she seeks out the merciful obliteration of a jackhammer, Lynne Ramsay despaired that it took them days to rent the equipment and get health and safety go-ahead-all for 30 seconds of film. In my occupation, I write, "Eva stood by the jackhammer," and voilà: Eva is standing by a jackhammer. Even in the UK, health and safety inspectors don't immediately rap on my door.

I needn't raise millions to start a novel; I press command-N on my keyboard and part with a few pence for a cup of tea. Writer World may be a cultural ugly ducking, but within the manuscript itself I enjoy God-like omnipotence, dishing out birth and death, success and failure, on my whim. I can conjure a jackhammer with ten letters, the end of the world with a few more. And I don't have to get along with hundreds of difficult creative people; I email my publisher from time to time, chat with one agent, and save my social energies for dustups with tin-eared copyeditors. Exiling the Alexander McQueen to the dry cleaners, I shamble joyfully to work in filthy jeans.