It was a quiet and wintery Monday night. I had spent the day channeling my inner Martha Stewart, doing such things as polishing the silverware and my sooty candle vases and churning out enough loads of laundry to persuade anyone rather convincingly that I cared for a family of six. I was in my Flashdance-cum-cleaning-lady attire of grey sweats, hair up in a messy bun and those shoes I only wear when no one is watching, UGGS. I had even taken off my nailpolish as though in one last emphatic nod to the slaving housewife. And after a day of slaving, the time had come to unwind. I made myself a cup of Mariage Frere’s The de Lune, took one last proud glance at my sparkly apartment, and pulled the receipt out of my newly bought Steve Jobs biography to begin reading. I would not trade this moment for anything, I thought. And then, the phone call arrived. “I have an extra ticket to the world premiere of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tonight, do you want to come?”

Aaaarrrrghhh! Did I want to come? Of course, the first ridiculously ridiculous thought that went through my head was that my nails weren’t painted! And then a torrential avalanche of others…didn’t I consider myself too intellectually superior to jump for something so materialistic and celebrity-filled as a red carpet premiere? What on earth would I wear – I had just bloody washed everything! Didn’t The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fall into that category of airport literature which I so despised? Would going to this turn out to be as painful as that time someone convinced me to go see The Da Vinci Code? Was I ready to swap my genius Steve Jobs for a smart Daniel Craig? Who was Daniel Craig anyway and had I even seen any of his movies? Did I really care to see him in the flesh? Oh, and I hate tattoos… “Listen,” the voice on the phone interrupted, “we need to be seated in about an hour, can you make it?” Could I make it? Well, the answer to this question was simple. I could make it only if I stopped the chaos of wondering whether I wanted to. I said yes and hung up.

The UGGs, sweats and poor Steve Jobs flew to the floor and I ran into my bedroom to face that conundrum of what to wear to a premiere that you only have five minutes to get ready for. Stop thinking, I said out loud. I grabbed a pair of black silk Balenciaga trousers, a sexy taupe slip and my good-for-absolutely-everything tiny COS blazer. Tuxedo chic always works, I thought, as I zipped up my snakeskin ankle boots and ran into the bathroom to start covering my eyelids with smoky eyeshadow. Stop thinking, I kept repeating as I watched the powder cascade onto my shiny white sink, stop thinking I said to the voice in my head asking how I planned to run to Leicester Square in those shoes, stop thinking about which clutch to take and just don’t take one. I grabbed my keys, card and phone and shoved them into my coat pockets as I ran out the door. And voila, by some miracle, in less than 65 minutes, I was running down the red carpet. Still, I might add, very successfully not thinking about the fact that Steve Jobs was lying on my living room floor asking himself and the pristine silverware what the hell had just happened.

I sat down in my seat, opened up my bag of popcorn, and after a quick sighting of Mr. Craig and that girl without the dragon tattoo in a fetching backless Givenchy number, the movie began. The opening scenes invite us into the crumbling life of Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a journalist who has just been sued for libel by an unscrupulous billionaire over the scandalous exposé of his business credibility. Ok, whatever, I totally just copied a large chunk of that sentence from this week’s Stylist. Charlie may do a lot of things but she don’t do film reviews. What I mean to say by that is, it’s the best movie I’ve seen all year, it was well worth the run, and its such a hardcore nail-biting thriller that you’re best off going like me, sans nailpolish.

Glamorously and hurriedly yours,

Charlie