Dinner with the retired academics. I made a big effort and stayed with the conversation. Spare me from old men’s calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience. Their wives are still real, warm people, compared with these old blokes frozen in their own importance. The jerky little tales of eccentrics and their drinking. Sly innuendo about famous women they have known, one of whom was said to have had ‘sixty-four lovers’. I sat quietly, thinking, ‘You call that a lot?’ Is this what V means when he says women never understand that men want to be with other men? Dread: he too will turn out to be manly in that way—looked after by a woman, no longer alive to her yet still drawing full benefits from her love and sacrifice…Is there hope for women and men?