‘You should just park your Volvo estate and walk every now and then,’ he suggested helpfully. ‘Then you wouldn’t have to worry about all the milk. And anyway, it’s semi-skimmed, this.’

‘It’s a Mercedes estate,’ I said. ‘But, yes.’

‘You really are posh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where are you from.’

‘Well, I live in Tuscany but I’m from London, of course. Posh people all live in London.’ (I am aware that this isn’t true, but I assumed he believed it to be so).

‘Whereabouts?’ he wanted to know.

‘When I lived there I lived in Hampstead.’

‘Posh,’ he nodded vigorously, putting my coffee on the counter. ‘I bet you’ve got a black Labrador, haven’t you?’

Now this was astonishing. What was he, psychic?

‘He’s called Marmite,’ I told the man and I showed him a photo of Marms on my phone.

I was still laughing my head off when I got back to my seat. All the soul-searching I do, wondering where I really fit in, who I really am, where I’m going and all that Oprah stuff, when, in fact, it’s absolutely obvious to anyone in the world exactly who I am, where I fit in and where I’m going. I told this story to a fellow Review Show panellist when we’d traipsed round the exhibition we were reviewing. The photos and the whole thing of it (Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester) made me cry, reminded me of my dad and stuff, and I was still a bit raw somehow. He laughed politely and said it was odd, wasn’t it, that this didn’t apply to him, that nobody could really pigeon-hole him in that way at a glance. This was even funnier than the Stokey man with the coffee machine pigeon-holing me. Not only could I pigeon-hole my colleague in two seconds and could imagine every item on his bookshelves, every piece of clothing in his entire wardrobe, but I felt I’d been out with him at least four separate times in my twenties. Everyone, it turns out, thinks they are unique and categoryless, everyone feels isolated and not really a part of the crowd when, in fact, it couldn’t be less true. It’s so easy to see, especially in England with our class system, precisely where everyone fits in. Say two words and I can tell what you watch on telly, which paper you read, where you go on holiday.

What people don’t realise about Britain though, I think, is that the class system is actually very fluid. Contrary to general belief, you certainly can become posh without having been born posh – and it’s not necessarily about money (that just makes you nouvy). I remember when I was at Westminster School telling people whose parents kept horses that I wasn’t really posh. ‘But you’re at Westminster, Anna,’ they said. This was a good point. After I’d been to Oxford and then married someone who would be an aristocrat if a relative hadn’t killed a king five hundred years ago by sticking a red hot poker up his bum, I stopped making my claim. It just wasn’t true any more.

‘You see,’ said my fellow panellist, ‘I may seem posh, but I’m actually working class. I grew up in blah and my parents worked in a blah and etc etc.’

‘If you go on News Review to talk about the arts you are not working class any more. Even if you once were,’ I said.

Anyway, looking at myself naked in the mirror after the show, exhausted but wired (live is stressy), wondering if the tube of Pringles I ate on the way up is anywhere in evidence on my arse (yes), I was suddenly aware that the way I see myself has no bearing whatsoever on what other people see. I can be described, we can all be described, in a few words. Posh blonde woman, the type who drinks americanos and has a Labrador. That’s me.

Anyway, here I am, blue pashmina wrapped round my neck, glasses on, staring determinedly at the screen. Really I am just neurotically checking my emails and reading the tabloids. This is working from home. I only communicate with my bosses by email. In fact, I only communicate with my friends by email. I only communicate with my husband by email. This is true even when he is here. He’s not very good with facemail.

In fact, I worked from home in my twenties when hardly anyone did. In those days I was on the phone to the Times for whom I wrote a weekly column. Not that email didn’t exist but people just phoned more. I used to go in to the office quite a lot to see everyone and chat and feel as if I had a life. Not that I did or anything, but illusion is everything.

Now work relationships are all online and something really horrible is happening. You know that advert about road rage that shows you how you wouldn’t behave like this if you weren’t in you car? It’s a bit like that with emails – people wouldn’t just ignore you when you spoke to them if you shared an office, if you passed them in the corridor to ask something about work or just to chat about your life. But people do ignore emails, effectively sending friends and colleagues to Coventry all the time (apparently this might be a reference to some Cromwellian soldiers being exiled to Coventry).

It happens to me every day. I email someone suggesting a piece I want to write and the person I emailed just never replies. The message, of course, is clear: ‘We don’t want the article.’ But not very long ago this would have happened by phone and they’d have said something like; ‘No, that’s not right for us.’ And when it first started happening by email people did politely email back, just as if you’d gone up to them in the office and offered them a piece to their face. Now people just don’t reply. Nothing. Empty screen. Silence.

I’m probably just stupidly romantic, but I find it really upsetting. It seems to me so bizarre that someone would just ignore me when I’m speaking to them. I don’t think I’ve ever ignored an email in my life – I just wouldn’t. BECAUSE IT WOULD BE APOCALYPTICALLY RUDE. Of course, occasionally, I might not get round to replying and then ages later I’ll write: ‘I’m so sorry it’s taken me forever to get back to you….’ But I would never just not ever reply. Asking someone to stop emailing you is not that hard, after all. I’ve often told people I don’t find junk joke emails funny and please don’t send them to me. They are always lowest common denominator humour – people slipping on banana skins to expose their arses etc. But simply never replying? Awful.I fell out with someone who I thought was my best friend a few years ago after she sent me a stunning email detailing what she hadn’t liked about me the last time she’d seen me (among other things – not as simple as that, of course). I replied with lots of apology and explanation and she just never wrote back. Not ever. It’s something that emails have allowed people to do. If we all lived in little villages with ducks and goats and donkeys and waded around in the mud with our rotten teeth and our fifteen children, we’d either have to talk to each other or tell each other why we weren’t going to talk to each other any more. A row would have to be had. We would have to turn away from each other in the street, making a point of it every single day. By email we can just send people to Coventry without thinking it’s even an issue. I can’t think of anyone who has just stopped talking to a person they see regularly. It doesn’t happen. You may not like everyone, but you exchange ordinary greetings just to acknowledge that you are both mammals and you are not about to bare you teeth and snarl. With emails there is no mutual mammalian acknowledgement. Fuck yous are easy to dole out and incessantly received. Because that’s what silence is.

I think that to speak to someone and be met with silence, a blank unknowing face, is one of the worst things in the world. There is a lot of psychoanalytic literature about babies looking for mirroring in the mother’s face and the damage that can be caused to infants by ignoring them or remaining blank. Unreplied to emails are the modern adult equivalent of that and it is a horrible, and actually quite new phenomenon. It’s a lot like road rage – something that shouldn’t be normal but has slipped under the radar and become standard behaviour. When did it become acceptable and can’t it be made to stop? Me, I have Lorraine Kelly for company. She always talks back….

Basically, about a month ago I dreamt I was at Heathrow with my mum and we were going to America for the weekend. We had a huge row because I hadn’t said I liked her new hairstyle and I stormed off, thinking I would punish her in the worst way imaginable – I would send her to America by herself. I laughed evilly to myself. When I woke up the dream struck me as very odd. I used to go unaccompanied to America to stay with my dad from the age of eight or nine and I loved going – it wasn’t a cruel punishment. We went to Disneyland and for tea at The Plaza, I went in helicopter rides around Manhattan and out for dinner in restaurants that looked like film sets – when I was ten I ate oysters and a no-dacquiri strawberry dacquiri at Number One Fifth Avenue, an art-deco place made to look like an old-fashioned cruise liner. I wrote about it all in my diaries. I loved it, didn’t I?

Disturbingly, in the days after the dream other memories kept crowding in, pattering about like ants. My dad drank a lot in the evenings and chain smoked all day and half the night. There was no bedroom for me in his small 27^th floor flat and he made sure (always joking) that I was terrified of the height, telling me what would happen if I or my teddy bear fell out of the window, off the roof that we climbed up on, down the lift-shaft, what to do if there was a fire or, God help us, if a plane flew into the side of the building. When 9/11 happened it looked familiar to me from nightmares my dad had inspired. My nightmare are still invariably about flying and lifts. He lived with a nice girlfriend I didn’t know well and she smoked too. I was put to bed in their bed and they rowed in the other room and drank. The next day dad and I went out for lunch in a glamorous restaurant. I loved the place – Mimosa on 2^nd Avenue. Dad knew the waitress who was pretty. Afterwards we took her to Bloomingdales and bought her a dress. This is all in my diary. It is clear now, though it wasn’t then, that he was sleeping with her. On the same trip we flew to Boston and dad had to work so I went up and down all day in the glass lifts at The Hyatt. I pretended it was fun but I remember now that I was really scared. I wrote in my diary; ‘Went in the lifts, bought bubble gum, wrote a story, made up some songs.’ I didn’t need to add that I did this by myself. That evening dad brought another girlfriend I didn’t know back to the hotel and I write that she stayed the night in our room. I make no further comment and I don’t remember the details, but I do note that I was asked to lie to girlfriend number one in New York. I put three exclamation marks. !!! Well, the guy had a strong TigerWoodsy element.

As the week after my dream wore on, I was forced to acknowledge that I had idealised this man and then missed the fantasty all my life. The first twenty years while he lived, the second twenty after his death. A war correspondent, he was killed by a sniper in San Salvador in 1989 when I was 19. It’s not that we didn’t do wonderful things together, and he was certainly very funny and charming. But he was not very often around and I was acutely anxious when I was with him. Homesick on the other side of the world, worried that he’d drunk too much and taken Mogadons to sleep and wouldn’t wake up, scared of him making my stomach sink with things he said that made me think he didn’t like me. I wrote in my 1979 diary that dad had hated a song I’d made up. ‘I was upset at first but then didn’t mind because it wasn’t very good.’ He once joked he would come into my room in the night and cut my very long blonde hair off. I believed him. I understood that this would be a ‘prank’ of some kind if it happened, but I still thought he really might take his joke that far. Of course, the high drama, fun and hilarity made all this exciting and irresistible, made my ordinary life as dull and denigrated as he openly thought it. Living in Crouch End and going to Budgens, the stuff of my life with my single mum, made him shudder in horror. He infected me with this cruel contempt for the ordinary nature of my life, and yet it was with him that I shuddered with fear, masked, of course, in great glamour.

Then, in dying as violently, shockingly, publicly (he was on the news being stretchered bleeding into the Rosales hospital, eyes open) as he did, he forced me to participate in the burning horrors that he spent his life observing. Suddenly I was hurled into the sharp extremes of existence, isolating me yet further from all my middle-class contemporaries for whom murder and the truth of violent hatred would hopefully never be the slightest issue. Absurd and pretentious-sounding, but it is hard to relax fully with people who haven’t been touched by horror, and in the life I live they are few.

In my real world as an ageing mother of two (my husband just tossed a huge Sky bill on to the bed – I am working from bed today – and then walked out again) I realised slowly that it is no surprise that my relationships with men are uniformly awful. I find people who are absent in body or mind or both and then I half kill myself wondering why they don’t really love me. I was 18 when I first fell in love and I remember thinking that Giles was able to make me feel as sick with fear and self-loathing when he said something negative as my dad could. So, it must be love.

As an adult, I spend most of my ordinary-life-time by myself, turning something on for the outside world in brief spurts, because the performance necessary to get on the rollercoaster of other people’s lives in true intimacy is too much to cope with. I just haven’t had the training.

As I remembered more and more little things I’d packed away to keep the fantasy intact I found myself shaking my head and saying out loud; ‘Fuck you!’ I imagined him laughing and shrugging, replying; ‘Fuck you!’

This, I understood, was the honest and funny relationship we really used to have and certainly would have now, had he lived. He introduced me as his ‘alleged daughter’ and I used to say; ‘You’re hardly even an alleged father.’ Sometimes I would add; ‘Fuck you.’

That was us.

Then, last night, I had another dream. I dreamt I was on my way to America to see my dad, the age I am now, 39, and my mum had taken me to the airport to buy my ticket. Suddenly, I panicked. Perhaps I had gone mad and he really was dead, really had been dead for a long time and I had hallucinated the conversation I’d had with him on the phone - I’d imagined it. I was crying and terrified in the dream, wondering if I could be as mad as to hear voices. Oddly, I phoned my uncle, my mother’s brother with whom I’m barely in touch, and I asked him in the dream what he thought. I could tell from his tone that it was true – dad was dead. But he said; ‘I don’t think it matters either way, as long as you have a great adventure.’ I decided not to bother getting on the flight, finally realising with regret, and not absolute conviction, that he wouldn’t be there.

This, I think, was my unconscious mind accepting that I had imagined and fantasised a wonderful relationship with an idealised man and that in reality he was very flawed and in many ways not really there, then as now. At last, after forty years of longing, I had absorbed the fact that he was, and will remain, dead. Not in Washington, Beirut or Tripoli. Just dead. I must have my great adventure, as ever, by myself.

‘Just pull over,’ my husband said, increasingly hysterical. ‘You’re going to kill someone.’

‘I swear to you,’ I hissed through gritted teeth, eyes glued to as much of the road as I could see. ‘That putting any of us or anyone else in danger is the last thing I am going to do. I just want to get there.’

I was upset that he thought I was risking our lives when in fact I was responding to a desperate desire to get us all home safe and warm, to avoid standing on the hard shoulder in the monsoon rain, hungry and cold, sprayed by thundering lorries. He gripped his seat and let himself be swept away by loathing of me.  I clenched my jaw tighter. I felt (though I don’t always) trapped in an endless grinding conflict. Life is full of difficult, if minor, decisions. We take them and then, for the Lord’s sake, we are attacked for taking them.

‘I’m going to have a cup of tea now.’

‘Why? You’ve just had a cup of tea? How much tea do you need to drink? We’ll be late if you have a cup of tea now. You should have had one half an hour ago. Anyway, there isn’t any tea.’

I didn’t make that up. It came from a friend of mine who is now divorced. Why, he wondered, couldn’t his wife have said: ‘You look as though you need a cup of tea, I’ll make you one.’

I didn’t have an answer to this apart from, ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea if you like.’

‘I don’t want one,’ he said. (I should stress that my own husband makes me lots of cups and tea and coffee, but you get the more general point).

Anyway, there I am driving through the gloomy rain with no windscreen wiper and a car full of angry people, dogs and bulky carved items (cello, bass and violin), effectively alone in my insanity and determination.

‘But why can’t I have any chewing gum?’ my son whined.

‘Because I am a horrible person! Is that the answer you need?’ I shouted. It was, I think.

And maybe I WAS being stupid. But one day I won’t be able to look after everyone and get them home safely. One day my eye sight will be weak, I will need to be helped home myself, the children will visit me on sufferance and all I’ll have is a head full of memories,  muscles that don’t work any more and bones that hurt. So, while I can get us home, I will. This (perhaps very mad) attitude is demonstrated in my feelings towards soup. I hate soup. Not because of the taste, but while my jaw is not wired and my teeth are still in my head, while I am not paralysed from the neck down or too weak to lift a fork laden with food, I will have my food unpureed thank you very much.

Later that evening (mission gruellingly accomplished), when the fires were lit and the rain was a comforting noise at the windows rather than a living threat, and the children had eaten hot chicken and then clementine cake (Nigella) I was talking to my husband (who is in something of a dream man phase again) about my gnawing fears. ‘When we are choosing a husband or wife, we don’t tend to wonder whether or not this is someone who will be kind when we need wheeling around the place, soup dribbling down our chins,’ I sighed.

‘No?’ He looked up scowling from his computer.

‘But maybe we should,’ I thought, the dreadful fear rising.

‘Should what?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

I get Madhur Jaffrey out and see what she says. Boil the milk for two hours, she says. The guests arrive in ten minutes, their sparklers are by their plates, the napkins have sprigs of holly in them (no, seriously) and this huge silver reindeer candelabra I bought in Amsterdam has red and silver candles already burning on the ten antler spikes. Okay, I think, maybe I can make panna cotta and put pistachios and rose water in it or something. I looked up the recipe in The Silver Spoon. Basically, you boil a bit of milk and dissolve gelatine in it. Then you warm a lot of cream and put sugar and whatever else in it (in this case a vanilla pod, pistachio nuts and rose water). Then you leave it to set …..for at least two hours! Aaaaaargh.

But with kulfi you freeze it because it is basically ice-cream. Evaporated milk ice-cream. So, here’s the answer. Make panna cotta with gelatine. Put it in little ramekins or glasses, sprinkle pistachio nuts into it and THEN freeze it! It was kind of frozen, kind of jelly-ish, really delicious. Now I know this isn’t proper food porn with all sorts of descriptions of the waxy emerald glint of the nuts in the soft pale flesh of the trembling pudding, but it’s still quite a good invention - neither leaving it to set nor having to boil it for hours, just twenty minutes in the freezer. Ha!

It was on the news. A hard fact now, illustrated by short scenes, brightly lit and frenetically cut together to demonstrate, perhaps, the dynamism of the forthcoming police investigation, the dedication of the reporter bringing you the breaking news live as it happens, or even, perhaps, to reflect the violent horror of the man’s death.

They showed the blue flashing lights of the empty police cars parked at frenzied angles and left running by the canals. And the still serenity of the ambulance that would be in no rush today. Nobody was under any illusions as to where Pavel Ivanchenko would be going this morning. They cut in a statement from a Kremlin official in Moscow denying that the Russian government had any involvement whatsoever in this regrettable incident and dismissing the very suggestion as ludicrous. Now over to the bridge where the reporter’s hair blew across her face as she shouted above the noise. Then some stills of Pavel standing on the terraces of his London football club, Katya next to him, smiling the tight smile of the lavishly imprisoned. And back to the studio.

‘That report from Serene Gosling in St Petersburg. Police spokesmen have confirmed that the body retrieved from the river Neva this morning is that of Russian tycoon, Pavel Ivanchenko, who was reported missing on Thursday by staff when he failed to return from what he had allegedly described as ‘an important meeting’ in central St Petersburg.  Ivanchenko, who accused Russian President Vladimir Putin himself of being behind two previous assassination attempts, had been in virtual exile in London for six years and was wanted in Russia on charges of embezzlement and tax evasion, though he is thought frequently to have entered the country, unknown to the authorities. ’

Mo breathed out.  She wasn’t sure whether the news made it seem more real or less real. Cobwebs seemed to surround her, slowing and tangling her every move, muffling sound and threatening to creep down her throat and stop her breathing. They had been there since she’d woken up on Friday (still, apparently, inhabiting her body but cruelly separated from every physical or emotional sensation).  She wriggled her toes now, touching each one to the cork tiles under them and looking out at the magnolia tree, whose huge creamy artichoke globes were getting ready to drop, exhausted, to the grass below them.  He was really gone.

The bracelet was heavy on her wrist, a twisted plait of diamonds and pearls, brilliant against her dark skin, the colour, he’d said, of chestnuts from the Siberian forests, shiny, glistening and brown as they burst out of their green cases.  This was Pavel in whispering romantic mode, breathing the soul of his vast country into her ears. But really, had it ever been true?

It was strange, she thought, having absorbed the sight of the limp body being hauled, dripping, out of the water, how still death is.  When that bestial, raging, choking struggle to live is finally over.

It had been worse than she’d thought. They should have given him the full dose, but Katya had been advised that that would make it detectable. Also it would taste bad. Mo, who knew nothing about poison, was reassured that even half of what they were giving him would kill an ox. Why an ox, she’d wondered, feeling sorry for this huge, gentle creature with a big wet nose who would topple sideways, tongue hanging out, lowing, not knowing why he was attacked or by what. Sorrier, by far, for this imaginary ox with his broad hooves, than she felt for their real victim.

As it turned out, he was stronger than any big-eyed ox. Katya, whose white mink was perhaps unsuitable for the occasion, realised something was wrong and tried to shoot him  but she missed and hit a painting above the fireplace, an 18th Century gypsy dancing scene, a kind of War and Peace image of Russia from a time when stirrups gleamed and moustaces bristled and peasants knew their place in the mud. As he ran at her she shot him again and blood spurted on to her coat and into her face but he kept running, knocking her to the ground and falling on top of her, drenching her with blood that was so hot it seemed to steam as it flowed.  A bowl of orchids had smashed to the floor. It was this that struck her most when she came into the room, just then, as it fell.

Mo, cold and clear as though she was standing in bright snow, tried to drag him off and plunged a large hunting knife into his back, feeling first the resistance of dense muscle and then the scrape of bone against the blade as she pushed. But he stood up, shouting, swearing in Russian, bellowing, hurling himself about until, unfamiliar, as if he were someone else, crazed with pain, perhaps, he threw himself out of the window, breaking the glass, sharp shards raining down on to the polished parquet inside and crashing into the concrete of the courtyard outside. Mo ran to the window as he lurched out towards the gates, barely human in his agony, garishly illuminated by security flood-lights.

Katya scrambled up and tore down the stairs after him, stumbling in her high heels, groaning and grasping at her bruised throat, the bodyguard standing there, inexplicably motionless. Mo followed now, out into the dark street to see Katya’s coat fly out as she turned the corner towards the river, aware on some level of where he must be going. Both women stopped, fifty yards apart, as Pavel climbed the embankment wall, pulling himself up on a lamppost with a fish tail winding around it, and hurling himself, with a final roar, into the black water.

Katya had turned and raised her white hand, almost smiling. Mo nodded and then both women were still.

Mo took a taxi to the airport and was in London again by dawn. The sky was pale blue at the edges by the time she turned the key in her front door and found that the flat smelt the same as it had when she’d left. Of toast and dust, of the apples that had been too long in the fruit bowl, of the paper record sleeves in the sitting room and the clean sheets she’d put on yesterday. She ran a hot bath with rose oil she’d bought with Pavel that time, and she put her clothes and shoes in a Tesco carrier bag to throw into the rubbish van as it moved, perhaps. She lay in the burning water staring at the cracks in the ceiling and wondering how she should feel, how other people had felt afterwards. She looked with detached interest at static scenes in her mind, flicking through a mental Roladex.

It occurred to her how strange it is that when death happens, scrolling backwards through the life that has ended, it seems so inevitable, its manner and all the particulars. It seems as though that life was constructed in every detail to meet that death and as though time was always hurtling towards it. But, really, she need never have gone on that first trip to Russia. Katya need never have left Kirgask for Moscow.  Her life, so swirling and chaotic, had not seemed, at any prior point, to be part of the design of Pavel’s death.  But now she and Katya had fulfilled their gruesome purpose and, for Pavel Ivanchenko, at least, time had stopped. Had it, she wondered, also stopped for her?  Or had it really stopped when she first saw Katya, smoking a cigarette in the lobby bar of the Ukraina Hotel?

No, she decided. That, of course, was when it had started.

Anyway, the plan she is hatching now is to find a nice man and have some children before it’s too late. I think the mistake she made (unconsciously, of course), and the mistake a lot of us make at some point, is to lack confidence in our own feelings. We go out for dinner with someone and feel a bit insecure, a bit unattractive, possibly boring, and, when the date is obviously uninterested, we wonder what we did wrong and, if we’re really nuts, we plough on with continuing to see them in order to correct the impression.

I remember this from finding a childminder for my son in New York. We had a couple of people in and my son just cried and wouldn’t go out with them. I apologised for him and felt cross with him and told him they were nice and told then he was a pain. He wasn’t though. They weren’t right and both he and I knew this immediately. When lovely Israela walked through the door we both pretty much fell into their arms. I just didn’t have the confidence to trust my son’s and my own feelings.

For things are simpler than we like to believe. I find myself singing Bob Dylan; ‘I’ve been shooting in the dark too long, When something ain’t right it’s wrong…’

If you are not having a nice time with someone, if being with them does not make you feel good that is not something that will ever change. You won’t change. They won’t change. It won’t change. Either you enjoy being with them or you don’t.

Of course, being with someone who makes you feel rubbish might well be a familiar childhood feeling, something that is homely to you and that you’ve always felt. That is the problem and the reason people get stuck in bad situations – they’ve never been in a good one and mild abuse is what they recognise as normal. But on some level I think we do know, even then, that it’s not doing us any good. We just don’t trust ourselves or have the confidence to believe that anything better might ever be on offer. But that doesn’t mean we should stay and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s going to change. Ever.

It reminds me of a time when one of my little sisters came home from school and said her friends were being mean to her. People who are mean to you are not your friends. Dates who make you feel a bit crap do not have any potential to be fulfilling partners, let alone for life.

The other big mistake everyone always makes, especially when they’re feeling insecure and time’s short, is to assume that nobody else is quite as sensitive as they are. So, while we’re worrying about whether they liked us and what every tiny element of a short text or email might mean….SO ARE THEY. If you have brushed someone off, they cared as much as you would if you’d put yourself on the line enough to dare to say you liked them. People who are acutely sensitive to everyone’s tiniest word and gesture often behave quite rudely or dismissively to dates and wonder why they then failed to persist.

I once whined and whined at my five year old sister about why someone didn’t call, even though I’d made it clear that everything was on offer, not to say in the bag. She thought about it and said; ‘Maybe he’s shy.’ I was so shy about it all that this had just not begun to occur to me. It was true, in fact. Though he was also a total nightmare but that’s another story.

Anyway, it’s odd to sit talking to someone about how to find a nice man, what constitutes a good relationship. Somebody nice is kind to you and makes you feel safe, loved and wonderful. Thin on the ground? Absolutely. But it’s good to have some clue what we’re aiming for. In fact, in this case, I may have found the ideal candidate for her but it’s hard to persuade this friend that someone who is actually single and actually gentle is a good catch. Why is that?

I find the idea of speed dating, internet dating and singles parties strange and frightening. I am the most opinionated person in the world and write people off on the basis of the vocabulary they use and misuse (anyone who has ever said ‘think outside the box’ or who has ever mentioned a ‘comfort zone’ is someone I can’t talk to, let alone ‘rocket science’). I can dismiss them in two seconds on the basis of their haircut (almost anything is unacceptable on a man apart from a short back and sides), their gait (swaggering – no thanks) and a million other things that spring to mind but that I can’t be bothered to list, especially since I know I’m already causing plenty of offence. However, when I do enter into a relationship, sexual or non-sexual, with someone who does not use clichés, knows the difference between uninterested and disinterested and can walk from A to B without looking like an arsehole, it nonetheless takes me about five years to really get to know them, to really find out whether we are suited to a life-long friendship.

Obviously, when you first meet someone great, of either gender, it’s exciting to have found a friend or lover who gets what you’re talking about, who makes you laugh and sparks your interest in things you haven’t much thought about before. This is intoxicating and I always find myself idealising people and diving headfirst into mega-friendship, partly because of an only-child loneliness, but also just because I get very enthusiastic about all kinds of things, not just people. My opinions are formed instantly and I shout them at whoever’s listening and at a lot of people who aren’t or who wish they weren’t. But it’s only when I’ve known someone for five years that I really feel I have a solid picture of them. Little snipes that can sound like banter when everything’s rosy can build, gradually, like small deposits in a bank account, into a mountain of undermining hostility. Equally, little gestures of kindness, like offers to babysit or to come and stay, gentle words when I’m unhappy, things that can seem insignificant or even insincere in small amounts, can build gradually, gesture by gesture, into a tower of loving support. You just don’t know, until building has gone on for a long time, until deposits of one kind or another have been made consistently, which way it’s eventually going to go. The odd snipe is fine against a background of love, and the odd kindness is insignificant in a sea of antagonism. I don’t know if there have been studies or if there are statistics, but I bet that people who have known each other well for more than five years before getting married have a far better chance of staying married than people who are still building their pictures of each other after getting married. Relationships are slow and behaviour fluctuates, but, like a pendulum, always swings back to the middle, to some kind of norm, so I think you have to watch someone over a long period of time to be sure about how they are likely to behave as time passes, to trust someone and to be sure of them.

Personally, I’ve had lots of relationships with men and friendships with women, all of them intense because I’m not very good at casual, that I’ve categorised immediately, only to reassess years later and find that the hurt that didn’t seem to matter on any individual occasion has done irreparable damage, or that my categorical dismissal of a person on grounds of bad behaviour was misguided and that, in fact, I’m left only with affection as the years pass. Of course, if the latter is an ex-boyfriend I treated badly only to realise later that he was actually lovely, it’s too late. I’m not trying to suggest that one’s instant reaction is always wrong, but I just wanted to add to the mathematical theory of dating and why it’s harder in heavily populated areas, where social circles shift and change. It’s not just a percentage game, it’s also a question of time and, in the case of women wanting to have babies, there isn’t enough time any more, unless you procreate with someone from school or university, to get to know enough people well enough to make a fool-proof selection. This, I think, is one of the reasons (apart from women being financially independent and not having to be shackled to someone horrible whether they like it or not) that marriages in modern society are so unlikely to last. I say this as my own twelfth anniversary looms darkly.

You see, in a vague effort to persuade people ever to read a word I write (pah!) I post my articles and stuff on Facebook. I posted a piece I wrote in last week’s Times about stress during pregnancy being bad for the unborn child. Straightforward and uncontentious enough, you’d think. But you’d think that without fully understanding the full depth of people’s boredom out there.

My Facebook friends are sunk in sofas watching toddlers grow. ‘Ooh, it goes by so fast,’ old ladies say. They say this because they have forgotten what it is like. This bit, the bit I’m in, when they’re entertaining, charming, often helpful friends to hang out with goes by fast. But those first five years, Jesus. I remember actually staring at the clock . Tick. Tick. Tick. Everything I ever did was an exercise in killing time until seven o’clock. Bed time. Wine Time.

Or my Facebook friends are, like me, idling in the golden Italian countryside, updating their Facebook status with things to make people in the UK jealous (‘Washing down the Ossobucco with some fine Chianti’) when really they are pining for drizzle, a pint, and a decent curry.

So, pretty much anything will spark off a fight. One woman felt that anything that supported women and children was a good thing. A man was sick of everyone telling everyone else what they should do. The woman took gender-based offence. The man caused more gender-based offence and started complaining about having to pay tax. I replied by posting an interview I’d done with a famous feminist. ‘This women is vile. Who cares about women when men are subject to so much violence?!’ someone shouted. ‘But she’s being interviewed ABOUT women,’ I yelled. ‘If she was being asked about donkeys in Spain I’m sure she would have mentioned the abuse they suffer.’

The Facebookers went wild, people pitching in from around the world. And what is so odd is that I was sitting by the fire in total silence (the odd crackle notwithstanding) while this e-conflagration raged. I Facemailed by husband about it (this is talking to the rest of you). He looked at me coolly over his screen and, without a word, piled into the melee online.

Those people out there are NUTS. But not, perhaps as nuts as the ones in this kitchen.