One of the many blessings of retirement is not having to mix business and pleasure

David Cameron was wearing his grim PMQs face at Wimbledon yesterday for the Murray match. It made him look as if he considered himself personally responsible for the lachrymose Scot’s performance. Was the PM worried that Alex Salmond – also in the audience, probably wearing saltire-patterned underpants - would accuse him of being anti-Scottish if he actually cracked a smile at any stage of the proceedings? Or was he worried that the British electorate would resent him having an afternoon off?

I’m sure many viewers did resent Cameron – and the rest of the Great and the Good (and Victoria Beckham) who were present in the Royal Box  – having ringside seats to such a fabulous event. I didn’t – I actually felt a bit sorry for them. I’d love to have been sitting where they were sitting, of course, because the view of the action must be just about perfect, but only if I could retain my status as a complete nobody. The problem with attending these things as PM (or even as First Minister for Scotland) is that you’re mixing business and pleasure – and there’s little pleasure in that.

The only time I’ve truly enjoyed socialising for the purposes of work was in my mid-twenties when I used to take literary editors and reviewers to lunch in an effort to get them to cover the books I was promoting, or entertaining writers who needed mollifying (all writers need mollifying all the time). The good thing was that most of the literary folk were fun to spend a couple of hours with – especially those from Fleet Street. My favourite was a Scotsman from the Daily Mirror with whom I staged regular, heroic, liver-destroying lunchtime drinking sessions over the course of two or three years. He would talk about his beloved roses and I’d gently inquire whether he didn’t have some work to do as we dived into the fourth bottle of wine and yet another slice of game pie. It also gave me the chance to meet people I admired, like Martin Amis and Peter Ackroyd, who worked for the Statesman and the Spectator at the time, and who otherwise wouldn’t have given me the time of day.

The reason the lunches were fun - for a while, at least – was that we were pretty much all arts graduates of one kind or another who loved books and enjoyed a drink and a gossip. It was a sort of unwritten rule that I’d only push our company’s books in the few minutes between handing over my credit card and the bill being settled. Of course, it helped that it was an era where returning to work pissed at four o’clock in the afternoon was perfectly acceptable – in fact, one boss I worked for used to do an excellent impersonation of my “I’m not drunk really” post-prandial return to the office.

But ever since then, I’ve had a horror of doing social things for business purposes. I went to a few functions as a writer – pressing the flesh, sucking up to potential publishers and reviewers, swapping anxieties with other writers – but felt so disgusted with myself afterwards, I soon gave up attending.

I’ve always done my best to avoid office parties of any kind. I remember getting into trouble for refusing to go to an end-of-year thank-you dinner with TV colleagues at the swanky South Ken flat of a famous newspaperman and TV presenter on the grounds that (a) spouses weren’t invited, (b) I didn’t like the man, and (c) I didn’t want to spend any more time with my work colleagues that I already had to. But mainly it was because I resented the conflation of work and business: when I go out for an evening, I like to choose the people I spend it with.

When I ran my own consultancy, I attended a number of industry networking events, but always felt like slashing my wrists afterwards (well, during them as well, actually). And I had to attend quite a few business lunches – with proper businessmen in suits and everything – and they were almost invariably ghastly affairs, especially without alcohol to fall back on. How exactly do you relax with people with whom you have absolutely nothing in common if you can’t drink? I’d look around the restaurant at  other business diners pretending to enjoy the company of people they’d probably be relieved never to have to meet again, as they desperately shovelled over-priced grub down their gobs, pretending to enjoy the wine, and boasting about other meaningless meals they’d had in other meaningless restaurants - and wondering whether I could create a stampede by shouting out, “We don’t have to do this!” 

Juat an anti-social bugger, I guess. 

I was interested to note that the likes of Ian Hislop and Sir Alex Ferguson were also at the Murray match yesterday, but sitting in the regular punters’ seats rather than the Royal Box. If I’m ever lucky enough to be at Wimbledon for another final, that’s where I’d like to be, not representing any organisation, not having to talk to anyone I don't want to talk to, sitting with people I really like. Otherwise, the TV set’ll do just fine.