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.

Women, more often than not, do things which aren't remotely relaxing but are all about preening, which is just another sort of work.

Grooming oneself with all the crazed compulsion of an under-exercised lab rat in order to hook a rich man and obtain a lush lifestyle makes a certain (albeit seedy) sense.

I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, but I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women, usually when I failed to respond to their advances.

There's something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times - one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of.

In my third husband I had discovered a blissfully laid-back type who thought it nothing less than hilarious when I misread the map on the way to Wales, so it took us an extra three hours, or when I was sick in a plastic carrier bag during much of the drive back from Devon - a bag that turned out to have a hole in it.

What sort of sap doesn't know by now that picture-perfect beauty is all done with smoke and mirrors anyway?