The WAG’s Diary. Alison Kervin

the distinctive sound of the bell (it plays the theme tune from Match of the Day) and the equally distinctive sound of footsteps padding down the hall to answer the door. ‘Cccchello,’ says Alba. ‘Ccccchhow can I ’elp you?’

      When Alba first came to work with us, with her beautiful Spanish accent, we spent all the time trying to get her to say words beginning with ‘h’ because her pronunciation of them was out of this world. That deep guttural ccccc sound that preceded every ‘h’ was great.

      ‘Can you do that?’ I’d say, pointing at the hoover.

      ‘Cccccchoover?’ Alba would reply, and Pask and I would roar with laughter. Mum thought it was all very juvenile, and that I was setting a bad example, but we did it in a nice way, we weren’t being nasty.

      While Alba leads the guys from Magick PR into the house, Mum doesn’t move at all—in fact she’s still too busy shaking her head and muttering some sort of Buddhist chant. If she’s not careful there’s every chance that her head will come off altogether.

      ‘I really don’t think you should be doing this,’ she says, once she’s returned from her brief meditation to rejoin the world the rest of us are living in. ‘You should remain silent and dignified and just keep yourself out of the papers. You certainly should not be doing something that is going to get more publicity than ever—it’s absurd, utterly absurd.’

      When the PR people walk into the room, though, Mum is straight to her feet and introducing herself to everyone. She’s air-kissing and explaining that she used to be a public relations executive in Los Angeles. Even Dean manages to look baffled by this sudden announcement. Up until this point he’s been like a little puppy dog next to her, nodding along with her and grinning inanely at her every suggestion. He’s always been like that around Mum. She does seem to have this peculiar hold over him. Indeed, she has a peculiar hold over all men. Dean says he just makes an effort with her because he knows how important she is to me, but it’s more than that, I’m sure of it. Not in a bad way—just that she has this kind of allure, this lustre, that men find irresistible. Perhaps it’s the macrobiotic diet that she’s always bleating on about, or the eighty-six supplements that she seems to take every day, but men are drawn to her like moths to a flame in some subconscious, deeply primitive fashion. They seem to want to be liked by her.

      ‘Were you really in PR?’ he asks, and Mum smiles in an unnecessarily flirty way and says yes she was, adding that there is much about Mum that Dean does not yet know. To his credit, at this point he does look rather scared.

       11.04 a.m.

      In they come, and all my worst fears are confirmed in an instant. ‘Dahhhling, how are you?’ they ask in their absurdly plummy voices. I smile and say ‘Hey, these things happen’, as if swinging Geri Halliwell’s dog around attached to a packet of bacon in a fake fur shop is something that happens daily—to everyone.

      ‘Now,’ says the man in the group, though ‘man’ is a very generous description of him. He weighs about the same as I do and has thinner thighs. Not good. ‘Let me introduce everyone.’ With a dramatic flourish, he says: ‘This is Arabella, this is Philonella and this is Marinella.’ Presumably, Salmonella was off sick. ‘We’re Magick!’ he announces, and the girls all giggle like helpless schoolgirls.

      The level of my dislike for them has risen to quite staggering heights, considering that a) I’ve never met them before, and b) they’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. The thing is, they’re young, they’re pretty and they’re sensibly dressed. They all have flat shoes on—in my house! One of them is wearing a string of pearls. Can you imagine? The only pearls I own are attached to a rather sexy little g-string, and there was this one time when Dean licked every pearl before…no, sorry, I shouldn’t really go into that here. Anyway, the girl with the pearl—Arabella or Rubella or something—well, she does not look like the sort of woman who runs about town dressed in a sexy thong, and perhaps that’s why I dislike her. Or it could be the combination of the gratingly upper-class voice and the fact that she’s young. Bitch.