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.

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

I just have a real problem with people who seek to portray fatness or thinness as moral concepts.

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.

I'll declare my own interest right here at the start and admit that, like the vast majority of people, I find youthful looks appealing.

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.

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.