Sadly, that does not apply at home. If you could see me now in my moth-eaten writing-garments, hair held up with a chopstick and glasses wonky, my underdesk a hazardous mess of wires connecting lumbering computer to brown anglepoise to yellowing BT telephone (c.1989, when nothing was stylish) to Rolodex to, no doubt, a fresh patch of damp which will electrocute me and burn my house down, you would sneer. It is a lonely life. If I want social stimulation, I have to send a nervy email to my agent who, understandably, tells me to be quiet. If I want technical help, I either cry alone or venture shyly into forums where raving madmen discuss firewalls and motherboards. I may have watched YouTube (twice) and bought (Dickens) on Amazon but I’m hardly an Early Adopter. I don’t even know what Bebo is.

And so, when Picador said that, to tie in with the paperback publication of When We Were Bad, they were setting up a vodcast with the Guardian, I looked blank.

‘A vodcast!’ they said. ‘Er, a video podcast. Telly for the net. The internet…you know?’ 

Now, let’s be fair. I may be a tragic square, better at scansion and synecdoche than burning illegal downloads, but if Doris Lessing can get down with the kidz and appear on the net, so can I. Surely all I’d have to do would be to stride photogenically around Hampstead Heath, improvising about unhappy families from Tolstoy to Enright, community claustrophobia and societal expectation, to a little camera.  How hard could it be?

Well.

First, there was the workwear.  Over the years I’ve acquired outfits for all possible events: weeping in self-loathing as another plot-line collapses; reading a section of novel to a book group containing, I realise too late, people who appear in the text, barely disguised; changing in the toilet of a small domestic US aeroplane before addressing a stadium full of intellectual grandmothers whose main interest is my marital status. But I have only one coat, and it’s just an everyday coat, not a 'here I am in a national newspaper' coat, so whatever carefully selected blogwear I chose to wear, all anyone would see is belted tweed - which I always hoped made me look like a member of the French Resistance but probably suggests golfing widows from Florida instead.  Worse still, I’d cleverly decided to wear my Cheltenham Boots, teetering monsters with 4 inch heels which, call me classy, I’d had to buy just before a festival event when I looked down and saw that my shoes did not match. No, not my outfit. Each other. And I know this sounds like a made-up sitcom moment but, sadly, it is actually true. 

But I’m a professional. A professional …something. Toes numb, mud-splashed, hair in my face and mascara running, I ignored the barking dogs and barking dog-walkers and bravely started to read the bit of When We Were Bad set on Parliament Hill.

‘Again,’ said the amused producer, the smirking camera-man, the gentlemanly Picador chap who kept trying to shield me with a pink plastic Princess Posy umbrella from the horizontal rain. ‘Again.’  ‘Again.’  And only on the fourth ‘Again’ did I realise that the issue wasn’t the whistling wind, or the humping Labradors, but the fact that it was a rude bit (there are so many!  Who wrote this filth?) and they were enjoying themselves.

Never mind. Professional. So I read to the end, and then we stood outside houses on the North London street where my characters, the Rubins, live, telling the people who came out of them that we were filming the house next door, sorry Madam, sorry, ahem. I felt cutting-edge and risky. And then we drove, sadly not in a Winnebago but a Vauxhall Astra, to Waterlow Park where, against a backdrop of scenic London, I was supposed to say fascinating things about family life: the unbearable claustrophobia, the roles we all adopt and, daringly, something about how England’s Jews, like so many other immigrant groups, can feel under huge pressure: on the one hand, to conform and keep their heads down; on the other, to try hard and work well and haul ourselves from the suffering our grandparents endured. Well, it’s true. Isn’t it?

But have you ever tried to sound brainy yet engaging, before a camera, for a national newspaper, in a typhoon, with every eccentric in North London out for a morning walk?  I can barely buy a paper without planning what to say beforehand. You know those guests on Have I Got News For You who are, invariably, rubbish?  That was me, only without the applause and chance to befriend Alan Davies. Added to that my unfortunate pre-war BBC accent, which makes me sound like a prepubescent Etonian despite not being either posh or a boy, the fact that night was swiftly falling by the time we pretended not to be standing outside a synagogue while filming its doors, my fear of being berated by every Jew in England for talking about being Jewish and every religious person anywhere for saying that I’d tried to believe in God but just couldn’t take to Her and…well, everything else, and you get the picture.

I, however, will not. When I refused to look at myself on the digital camera viewing thingy, the producer smiled indulgently. When I told him I wouldn’t be watching at the vodcast, his face fell. But how can I, if I’m to retain any self-belief at all? 

Novelists may complain about the loneliness, the cold, the sardines-with-mango-chutney horrible meals we prepare. But at least we’re not out there in the real world, extreme ad-libbing, making cyberidiots of ourselves. As of last Friday, I’m convinced that I and my fellows should stay indoors, in wide-sleeved velvet garments or monks’ robes, writing at lecterns and eating curds and whey. While the rest of you, the experts, fill the blogosphere.

Come on. Please. We, clueless novelists of the world, are relying on you.

[Charlotte Mendelson’s new novel, When We Were Bad, is available in paperback now here. You can view Charlotte's video podcast on the Guardian site here.]