Sometimes she says things quite happily which, when you think about them, are actually quite sad. When she first met Richard and he'd leave messages on her answer machine she'd save them to listen to again and again. However, if she called him and he wasn't in, she would not leave a message. "My voice is so awful I thought that if he heard it without seeing me, he'd go right off me." There might, even, be something a little sad about a nearly-60-year-old saying: "I can tell you at any point in the day, Deborah, how many calories I've had so far." I'm not sure why, but the fact she will tell you these things reclaims her somehow.Of course she knows there's a difference between having 17,000 names on a database and 17,000 friends.

Carole, how many of those 17,000 could you call in the middle of the night if you needed to? "A tiny handful," she admits. She knows, too, that there is a difference between making friends and collecting people, which she seems to do with an almost forensic passion. There's even a passage in her book about what to do when a "friend" makes you cross. "I feel it helps to write down the things about them that are annoying, then tick off those I'm prepared to forget." She says she doesn't know why she is like this.

"All I know is that I love meeting people and love bringing them together." Yes. And pathologically so.What, I ask, if you were to wake up one morning and discover your database had been entirely wiped? "I'd be hysterical," she says – though she did once lose her Filofax and diary. And? "It was quite a feeling of exhilaration, in a funny sort of way. Although I was devastated, the important things would reach the surface. Richard always says to me that I must let some things fall though the slats.