“I really loved working at the Mirror with Piers because he didn’t lock himself up in his office. He would spend all day wandering around the big open plan office talking and joking with people. He’d started out on the Bizarre column at the Sun so he always had a soft spot for the showbiz department which was great.”

However, although she loved working for the Mirror, she admits that there were some downsides to being a 3am girl – especially when it came to holding down relationships.

“A lot of male gossip columnists managed to hold down relationships but most of the girls found it impossible. I think it was a combination of cancelling at the last minute and going to glam parties all the time. I think it would be pretty hard not to be jealous about your girlfriend going out in really skimpy clothes to chat up male celebrities!

“I think that’s partly why journalists end up sticking to their own – you spend so much time together that the job becomes your social life as well.”

She believes that this is part of the reason that few gossip columnists work the celebrity circuit for more than five years and in 2005 she decided it was time to leave 3am.

“You begin to see all the same faces and after Big Brother started, things changed. For the first series of Big Brother we refused to put any of them in the column because we didn’t think they were real celebrities. But after a while I realised that reality TV people were a lot of our daily bread and butter and that was a pretty sad state of affairs. The calibre of star really diminished over time and it’s definitely not as glamorous as people think it is. It definitely isn’t glamorous at all when you’re at parties with the likes of Jodie Marsh. Piers never wanted us to put them in the column and I agreed with him.”

“Eva Simpson, the other surviving 3am original, was leaving to have a baby and it seemed like a good time to make a move,” she tells me. “I had great fun but I had the feeling I needed to cut back whilst I still had dignity. I really didn’t want to turn into a bitter alcoholic doing the same job after twenty years.”