While I was cleaning the bathroom basin V came in and we had an interesting discussion. Leaning against the door jamb with his arms folded, he advised me that it was time for me to stop writing ‘about the 70s’. Oh? Why’s that? Because the 70s was a ‘period of bullshit, of clapped-out theories that Victoria is now bearing the brunt of.’ Apparently G shared his opinion; indeed he had told V that he’d already had ‘a little talk’ with me about it. I said we hadn’t spoken about this as far as I recalled. Shifting my energies to the bath, I pointed out that certain social changes had occurred in the 70s that people had been deeply affected by—that this could not be scrubbed out of either my characters or me, and that to attempt it would not make sense. I said that his work was coloured by different assumptions because his ideas were formed in a different era and through different experiences. I said that whenever I read him I felt that I was in the 50s. He said that much of his work was set in no-place and no-time. I said that it was in the relationships between men and women, and in the underlying assumptions about these, that period still made itself felt. He asked me what I thought about what he’d said. I said, opening the toilet lid and attacking the rim of the bowl, ‘I don’t think anything in particular.’ He pressed me harder. I said, ‘I understand the point you’re making. But I can’t say how it will affect me, until I sit down to write the next thing.’ I forbore to point out that in the simple fact that I was on my knees scrubbing the porcelain as we talked, and in the fact (which he had only the other evening admitted publicly without shame or remorse) that he has ‘never cleaned a lavatory in his life’, resided a thundering piece of…whatever it is we were talking about: a whopping great assumption about men, women and domestic labour which dates him, and judges him, as accurately as does any misplaced nostalgia that I have been reproached with.