The truth of the matter is, beauty is a specific thing, rare and fleeting. Some of us have it in our teens, 20s and 30s and then lose it; most of us have it not at all. And that's perfectly okay. But lying to yourself that you have it when you don't seems to me simple-minded at best and psychotic at worst.

Transsexualism is, basically, just another, more drastic twist on the male menopause.

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

It's received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.

If you want sex, have an affair. If you want a relationship, buy a dog.

The Feminist Me says that a woman's right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps.

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.