The NHS says 65 percent of consultants are male. If that’s the case I feel sure that I must have seen at least 50 percent of them. I’m exaggerating, and perhaps the area of medicine I fall under, or into – rheumatology, is not that interesting for women (frankly, it’s not even that interesting to me).
A dear friend, lets call her B, has just suffered a bereavement. We agree to meet for a coffee and a shared piece of cake (let’s not push the boat out too far) at one of our favourite places. If you have read me before you’ll know that I’m wrestling with a chronic illness which leaves me exhausted and often at times struggling to make the simplest of decisions – for example, jeans or Zara striped pants? Today I’m in the jeans which are clean and a sweater which is un-pilled cashmere, so I’m ahead of the game.
Readers the title of this piece, which is indeed a play on that joyless 1970’s sex book, is not in any way to suggest that there’s anything sexual by way of your (or for that matter my) relationship with your hound of choice. But ask yourself, over the past few years, which particular relationship has satisfied you more, the one with your faithful, greying companion with the dimming eyes, the increasingly laborious gait, occasionally given to displays excitable if limited affection……. or the one with your dog?
‘The trouble with us’, says a friend who used to edit a Sunday newspaper and is now retraining as a chef, ‘is that we used to be somebody’. Did we? Or perhaps I should say ‘Did I’? Because said friend is now already officially ‘somebody’ again, a busy private chef, restaurant critic and food editor. I, on the other hand, find myself defined by something else entirely unexpected and unwelcome (though for the record I’m not convinced that editing fashion magazines, writing columns and sitting on uncomfortable chairs at fashion shows ever really qualified as anything meaningful).