Since last October I have been badgering the factor about the cessation of stair cleaning. In the Good Old Days that weren’t so good, the women of the stair took turns to sweep and scrub, putting a card through the door of the next (female) person. Now, part of my…

Walking back from my ballet class, I came upon a man and a dog, approaching me from the opposite direction. The dog, a large black and white mongrel, seemed to smile at me, and I smiled back. Its owner, a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing an anorak, smiled…

Clive James famously described the face of Barbara Cartland as a flock of crows embedded in a chalk cliff. A cruelly accurate and witty description that distils the social contempt for old women. Let us not forget, for all his extraordinary cleverness, Clive was also a fat, bald man with…

In March, I went to my first tango event, a milonga, in two years. I went on my own. My tango wingwoman had to pull out because of a knee injury, and other tango friends were away that weekend. Imagine going to a party on your own, where you don’t…