Heading to the Emmy Awards last year, I had naively thought I'd be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood's elite, but here's the thing: I hadn't realised that going to the Emmys as a normal person is not the same as going as an A-lister.
It's more like having concert tickets you bought at the last minute.
You know what I mean? The ones where you're right up the back in the nosebleeds and Taylor Swift is a teeny-tiny flea so you spend the entire show watching the giant TV screens just like you would at home.
Your night begins by being shepherded through an underground carpark, which looks like the kind of place a night noodle market might be held. Then you file down a purple (not red) carpet, which runs parallel to the proper red carpet for the stars.
There's a wall between the carpets, but it has little gaps in it so, if you're lucky, you can crane your neck and try to spy some celebs — kind of like how the handmaids have those secret meetings through the supermarket shelves in The Handmaid's Tale.
The best part about the pleb carpet, though, is that if you're none the wiser, in photos it looks exactly the same as the red one.
It's got the big sparkly Emmys statues, the big sparkly Emmys logos and the big sparkly photo opps, so to your Instagram followers back home you look like you were next to the stars the whole time.
Plus, the celebrities are on the other side of the room, so you can't make anyone out even if you have supersonic squint vision.
After the show, everyone files out in a sweaty, boozy pack into the carpark where winners take their awards to a special, roped-off area to have pre-prepared plaques added on.
Then the celebs are shipped to a soiree called the Governors Ball, and all the B through Z-listers trickle off to after-parties.
You probably won't be surprised that I didn't manage to sneak into an A-lister after-party.
I went for dinner at a Japanese restaurant, sloshed back to the Hollywood Roosevelt and commiserated with myself about the time I very nearly almost met Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
I'd love to tell you I bumped into Meryl Streep in the bathroom or slipped Hugh Grant my phone number in the carpark, but I genuinely didn't see a single celebrity.
I think I know where I went wrong though, and if I could go back and do it over I know exactly what I'd do differently: Turn my Tinder on, set my radius to the diameter of the venue, cast that long line out and reel 'em in that way.
