I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?

Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

Now the whole dizzying and delirious range of sexual possibilities has been boiled down to that one big, boring, bulimic word. RELATIONSHIP.

I feel I'm trying to get this really crap car going, and it just keeps stalling on me. And then other times I feel like my life's a train thundering toward me, and I'm in a car stuck on the crossroads and can't get out. Isn't it great being young!

Sadly, a lot of what passes for feminism these days is just moaning about men, congratulating ourselves on nothing in particular, and mocking them for being big kids while doing everything we can to keep them that way.

I jest, of course; premature ejaculation isn't a laughing matter for anyone, except for your friends when you tell them about it on the phone the next morning. My first marriage ended because the main event was invariably over before my husband got his socks off.