Having lunch with Maureen Dowd makes you feel as if you’re in a Woody Allen movie. The New York Times’ columnist has a dramatic aura about her and it is rather contagious.

Perched on a corner seat at the uptown bar of Cafe des Artistes on a gloomy Saturday afternoon, Dowd pushes her reading glasses down her nose and looks up from the gossip pages of The New York Post to appraise me. “Lindsay Lohan. I see it. Lindsay Lohan,” she says, repeating the name of the dizzy 19-year-old actress, who is - in her opinion - my doppelganger. “You look exactly like her... You just need a few red streaks.”