Category: Blog

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…

My ballet class is held in a ground-floor studio with a picture window that looks out on a back lane. The other day, the teacher fell about laughing. He teases us, but he is not a cruel man, certainly not by ballet standards, and I didn’t expect he was laughing…