Claudia Carroll - Personally, I Blame my Fairy Godmother

Anyway, I could talk about Sam all day, but I won’t. Suffice to say that like a good little Super Couple (the tabloids’ mortifying tag, not mine) I went along to the party with him, intending to only stay for just the one and somehow it ended up being 5 a.m. by the time we crawled out of there…

The funny thing is, people think that Sam and I have this glittering, red carpet, party lifestyle; what they don’t realise is that it’s actually work. Honestly. OK, so it may look like our lives are one big, long bank holiday weekend, but trust me, it takes it out of you. It is also costing me a bloody fortune.

‘Stop looking over at the fireplace, keep your eyes to me, Jessie,’ whispers lovely make-up girl as she gamely dabs concealer into eye sockets which still haven’t properly opened up yet.

‘Oops, sorry,’ I mutter.

Shit. She caught me staring up at the Visa bill. Which, now that I come to think of it, mightn’t be too bad this month, I desperately try to convince myself. Because I really did try my best to be good, cut back and live within my means, as my accountant put it during one particularly stern phone call which I’d quite frankly prefer to blank out, after she discovered that the interest on my credit card was more than half what I pay in rent for this house. And that’s only the credit card she knows about; I’ve another secret one, also maxed out, that I’m too scared to even mention to her, for fear the woman will have an anxiety stroke.

‘You don’t understand,’ I hotly defended myself to her. ‘Anyone who lives and works in the public eye has a lot of unavoidable day-to-day expenses.’

‘And what exactly would these “unavoidable expenses” be?’ she politely asked. The business-class flights for a trip to New York that I forked out for? The clothes and blow-dries and manicures and spending money which I needed for said trip? Not to even get started on the hotel we stayed in, which only cost about five times more than I could afford.

Sam’s unstoppable drive and my chronic over-spending, you’ll see, are pretty much the twin kernels of my life right now. Tell you something else too; toxic debt-related anxiety and a thumping hangover make for one helluva lethal cocktail. As the sainted make-up girl lashes on more bronzing powder than you’d normally see on the whole of Girls Aloud, I do a few quick mental sums.

OK. I’m three full months behind on rent. I can’t even remember the last time I wasn’t overdrawn. All I know is that the letters I keep getting from my bank manager are becoming progressively snottier and snottier. Phrases such as, ‘Central debt recovery agencies,’ and ‘You realise this will affect your credit rating for a period of XXX…’ have even been invoked. Shudder.

And there’s worse. Far worse. Up until last week, I was the proud owner of a flashy, zippy little BMW Z4 sports car, cherry red with bright lemon-yellow seats, which I know makes it sound like a packet of Opal Fruits on wheels, but trust me, the colour scheme did actually work. Anyway, I got it on one of those car-leasing HP deals, where the idea is you drive off in a brand, spanking new set of wheels immediately, then pay it off by the month. Perfect deal for someone like me; live now, pay later. Trouble is, I got so scarily far behind in repayments that, one night last week after way too many glasses of wine at some art gallery do, I crawled home at all hours in a taxi to find the car gone from my driveway. Just gone. Disappeared. So I thought it was stolen, natch, and was on the verge of ringing the police when I found a letter on my doorstep telling me it had actually been repossessed. Course I was way too morto to tell anyone the actual truth, so I decided the best humiliation-avoidance tactic was to stick to my original ‘stolen car’ story. Which I would have got away with too, only Emma Sheridan, my best friend and co-presenter at work, bounced into the production office a few days later and told me she’d just seen my ‘stolen’ car in the forecourt of Maxwell Motors with a big ‘For Sale’ sign stuck on it. Definitely mine, she insisted, sure how many other bright red Z4s are there on the road with lemon-yellow leather seats?

So I was rightly rumbled and had to confess all, but the thing about Emma is that she’s not just a showbiz pal, she’s a genuine pal. In all the years I’ve known her, there are two things I’ve never, ever seen her do; repeat gossip or eat chocolate. As discreet as a nun in a silent order about her own private life and yet the only woman I know who’s honest enough to admit to Botox. Bless her, when I came clean about my money woes, she even offered me a cash loan to tide me over. So now, whenever anyone asks me when I’m getting a new car, lovely, loyal Emma laughs and waves it aside and tells me it’s nearly cheaper for me to get cabs all the time.

Whereas the actual truth is, the way things are going, I’ll probably end up walking everywhere from now on. Barefoot. In the lashing rain. With newspaper tied with twine around my feet and bloodhounds baying at my heels. Singing the orphans’ chorus from Annie, ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life.’

Worse, though, I think, as a fresh wash of anxiety comes over me, is that there doesn’t seem to be any end to my money troubles. Ever. You see, with myself and Sam, there’s always the next night out, the next weekend away, the next trip abroad. Easter is only round the corner and we’ve already booked to go down to Marbella which I can’t afford and yet at the same time, can’t get out of.

Honest to God, I sometimes feel like I’m stuck on a never-ending financial hamster wheel where I’m constantly stretching my almost-melted credit cards just to keep pace with him. I’m not even certain how it happened, but somehow I’ve got sucked into a world where appearances are everything and it’s like I’ve no choice but to spend big just to hold my own against all my new, posher, wealthier friends.

This house being the perfect example. The logical part of my brain, which let’s face it, I don’t hear from all that often, tells me that it’s completely mental; the place is ridiculously expensive and way too big for me, but when it first came on the market…hard to put into words, but it was like all my childhood fantasies finally coming true. I just had to have it, simple as that. So now I’m a lone, single person renting a five-bedroomed mansion which I can’t even afford to get the downstairs toilet unblocked in. Christ alive, let it be engraved on my tombstone. ‘Here lies Jessie Woods. Fur coat and no knickers.’

On the plus side though, I really have made a heroic effort to economise this month. In fact, I distinctly remember suggesting to Sam last weekend that there was no need for us to bother eating out in Shanahan’s on the Green, where the starters are so tiny, they’d leave a fruit fly gagging for more. Instead, let’s stay in and I’ll cook, I gamely volunteered. Well, the man nearly had to pick himself up off the floor he was laughing so hard. Honest to God, he was still sniggering two full days later. I’m the world’s worst cook and have the burn tissue to prove it. And for some unfathomable reason, no matter what I do to food, it always ends up tasting like wood. Wood, or else feet.

But the point is that I’m trying.

Take last month’s New York trip for instance. It wasn’t even my fault. Well, not really. You see, Sam and I are really matey with this other couple, Nathaniel and Eva, who are old buddies of his, dating back to his school days, and we always pal around in a foursome with them. They’re lovely, gorgeous people, but…the thing is, they just have so much more money at their disposal than I have. Nathaniel is chief executive of his family’s recession-proof beef export business and basically keeps himself on a Premiership footballer’s salary. He and Eva have been married for years and have two perfect twin boys, with an army of nannies to take care of them, leaving Eva with a lot of free time on her hands for weekends away, charity lunches and shopping trips abroad. Which is actually how that New York trip came about in the first place; it was their wedding anniversary and nothing would do them but to organise this lavish trip to stay at the Plaza, where they got married. And of course, Sam and I, as their closest friends, were invited along. Now I know Sam would gladly have offered to pay for me if I’d asked, but he knows me well and knows I’d die rather than do that; I’m so much happier paying my own way. OK, I may be up to my armpits in debt, but at least I have my independence.