Cover your ears, I may shout a bit here... I WON THE ROMANTIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR!! Well, my book did, but you know what I mean...

Yes, it's true!  Honestly.  Look...

And, oh, my little chucklebunnies, there was wine...and people...and balloons, and shoes and canapes.  And there was me, in the middle of all of this, giggling like a loon and giving the world's most improv speech which featured (so I am told, for I suffered from some kind of shock-induced memory lapse, and nothing whatsoever to do with the alcohol for I am not that kind of woman, no sirree) incontinence wear.  There is only one phrase to sum up how I feel about my speech, and it is the good old phrase beloved of anyone who has had to abbreviate their feelings on Facebook or Twitter.  And it goes like this..

< headdesk >

I started the evening like this...

...although a little mad-about-the-eyes, which I put down to trying to appear both intelligent and sensible.  Also wearing make-up which I apply in the same way as a monkey paints with a stick.  Anyway. I blame the balloons for what happened next, or it might have been the heels, because first they announced the winner of the Joan Hessayon award for first published novel, and it was won by Choc Lit's very own Evonne Wareham, so obviously I had to toast her in champagne.  Quite a few times, because it was a terrific win!  And then they announced the Romantic Novel of the Year, so I toasted the announcement, and was just about to toast the winner when they read out my name...

And when I stopped thinking I was going to faint, and made my way through the crowd, most of who thought I had come to read the meter, I had to do a speech.  And I fear...oh, here comes that headdesk again... that the only thing that would come to mind was to talk about how, if told ten years ago that I would win the Romantic Novel of the Year Award (no, it never gets tired, writing that) that I would have wet myself...and that I still might...

And people laughed.

Kay Burley presented me (well, she tried to, I kept giving it back - large glass objects and I do not mix.  I've already dropped one television, thank-you-very-much..) with a glass rosebowl.  It is soooooo beautiful that it will be as out of place in my house as an academic in Hollyoaks.  But once the cats have had a go at it, and the dust has accumulated, I am sure it will fit in perfectly.  And after that the evening started to look like this...

And I STILL don't believe it, despite my name being dropped absolutely everywhere, from the BBC Entertainment News website to the local newspaper, and I STILL wake up in the morning thinking that I've just had a particularly nice dream (no, not the one about Tony Robinson and the cream cake...although, thinking about it, that one must be due a revisit sometime soon) and then I open my eyes and IT'S ALL TRUE. And then I think about the others on the shortlist with me (including Choc Lit's own Christina Courtney) and I am convinced that there must have been a terrible mistake.

But I am prepared to fight to the death to keep the rosebowl.  Just, you know, not in heels or anything.