It’s that time of year again. Most of my friends are wandering around in a haze of alcohol; either drunk or horribly hungover. Me, I am polishing my halo as I turn down a second Christmas party this season to stay at home and watch my son (pictured here) make his stage debut. I was due to head to London next week for the Daily Mail party but have decided not to go. Leonardo’s school play may not be as entertaining as some of performances seasoned Mail hacks come up with but it’s just one of those things I can’t miss.

Also, Christmas parties are notoriously dangerous. I remember my mother years ago giving me the only piece of career advice she ever gave me. “Never get drunk at the office Christmas party,” she told me. Of course I totally ignored her. I have often woken up the morning after an office party, drifted between semi-consciousness and consciousness, realised why I feel like I’ve been hit over the head repeatedly with a cricket bat and then sat up in bed and wailed “NO, please, please, please someone tell me I didn’t do an impression of a lap-dancer on heat/insist on photocopying my cleavage /tell the boss how to run his shitty little company, resign and then try to snog him.”

We’ve all been there. The Christmas office party, it’s an institution, rather like fish & chips or the cup final. It’s the one time during the whole year we’re allowed to behave appallingly badly and all is forgiven. A policy of shaded windows applies; what goes on at the party is not allowed to be revealed outside the office and no on is held accountable for any misdemeanours. Suddenly everyone from the chief exec to the lowliest secretary is only as strong as their resistance to alcohol and most of them revert to teenage behaviour almost immediately. Forget I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here. Why not just film a few Christmas parties; where the rules of the jungle really apply?

Unlike my mother I won’t advise you to stay sober; it’s just not an option. But one tip I learnt from a French woman now living in London is to start the evening drinking water. That way by the time you get drunk, everyone else will be so far gone there’s no way they will remember you trying to nick their boyfriend, job or, most appalingly, their Jimmy Choo suede slingbacks.

Two Lipsticks and a Lover came out in the US a week ago and Penguin is already reprinting which is great news. It has also made it to the top 10 ‘health & wellness’ books sold there. Sounds like rather a namby-pamby category but any top 10 feels good to me. Over there it is called All you need to know to be impossibly French, I think the lover thing was a bit too risque for the puritanical Americans. Unlike the French of course, which is the subject of my column in the Sunday Times today. .

The only downside with being published in the States of course is that I now have to check my amazon rating on amazon.com. And with the speed of the internet connection here that could take me most of the morning. Especially as they have this brilliant statistic which tells you how many people who clicked on your page then went on to buy your book. On my page it’s 42%, but another 42% went on to buy the latest tome by Mirelle Guiliano (don’t even think about it, mine is much more amusing).

Then of course I have to check my rating on amazon.co.uk, so there goes most of the afternoon. Oh well, the next book will just have to be late…..

The other reason my amazon rating is doing so well this week is that on Sunday Ciao Bella was listed in the top five memoirs of the year in the Sunday Times. I had no idea this was going to happen and in fact was just complaining to my husband that I wasn’t included in any such lists when he said “But you’re here, look, Ciao Bella, number three, the reviewer calls it a delight”. “Yeah, right,” was my response. He has to show it to me before I believed him. And there she was, in glorious technicolour.

On the same page was Gore Vidal’s memoir (although he didn’t make it to the top 5). I met Gore Vidal that first summer in Italy I write about in Ciao Bella. He was an imposing and elegant figure, surrounded by books and servants. He showed little interest in me, preferring my handsome uncle, but he did take me into his study and hand me a copy of Myra Breckenridge. “This little lady caused quite a stir,” he told me.

Of course I hero-worshipped him. I never forgot his study overlooking the bay of Ravello with its vast desk and leather-bound books. To me, an aspiring writer aged 14, it seemed like heaven on earth. To be on the same page as him in a book selection is a huge honour. Although he might not feel the same!

Things are looking up. Today an interview I did for Woman’s Hour was broadcast and my amazon rating shot up. Let’s hope it has the same effect in the shops. But as my husband points out, I’m still out-selling Proust by about 350,000 so all is not lost.

We are just back from a trip to a lovely place called St Endreol half an hour from St Tropez. Rupert was writing another Times piece and I was there to investigate the £20 million spa for my next book which is all about ageing. I found the sauna was a bit cold but was told that it had to be turned down for all the old people. How bloody irritating is that? What about us young-ish people? Are we supposed to freeze to death? When I was last in England my friend Annika was telling me about old people pushing their way to the front of the five-items-only till at Waitrose with great trolleys laden with Rich Tea biscuits. If anyone complains they simply yell “I’m 82 you know” and push harder. As Annika puts it: “I’m so over old people”.

Click here to listen to my Woman’s Hour interview.

I am in the George V in Paris. Sadly I am not staying here with some multi-millionaire pop star lover, but interviewing people for Universal Television. I work as a headhunter when I’m not writing. The hotel is splendid, but I feel rather under-dressed. I can’t help thinking maybe a ball-gown would have been more appropriate. Perhaps a tiara to match. I have seen more chandeliers in one morning than I have during the rest of my life put together. The service is slick and fast. Almost as soon as I sat down for breakfast (a bargain at 40 euros for an orange juice and a fruit salad, why would you ever want to pay less?) a waitress produced a little stool for me to put my handbag on. Now I love my Tod’s handbag and I do take care of it but I’m not sure it will ever recover from its VIP treatment today.

Even outside the confines of the George V Paris seems a lot more civilised than London. The streets are emptier and the shops nicer. The only downside here is the amount of homeless people. I must have passed about five of them on my way to dinner last night. One young man looked up from his sleeping bag, smiled and said “Bonsoir Madame”. It seems even the down and outs are civilised here.