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I’m being clairvoyant, any serious political movement that relies on beauty to sell it is doomed

oh come on, the media’s obsession with beautiful women is nothing new, look at Gloria, Germaine and Angela in their youth, brilliant women but hardly ugly ducklings, if women are young, beautiful and fuckable, they get the coverage, whether they’re musicians or paediatricians

paediatricians, Ams?

it rhymes, Dom, it rhymes

and another thing that bugs me are the trans troublemakers, you should have seen the stick I got when I announced my festival was for women-born-women as opposed to women-born-men, I was accused of being transphobic, which I’m not, I’m absolutely not, I have trans friends, but there is a difference, a man raised as a man might not feel like one but he’s been treated as one by the world, so how can he be exactly the same as us?

they started a campaign against my festival which was taken up by someone with a million followers on Twitter called Morgan Malenga who kept up the attack for months, severely damaging my reputation until I backed down

Dom, you’re so funny, er, troublemakers? protest? remind you of anyone? we’d have given people hell on Twitter if it was around when we were young, can you imagine? and the trans community is entitled to fight for their rights, you need to be more open-minded on that score or you’ll risk becoming irrelevant, I’ve had to completely readjust my thinking having a ‘woke’ daughter who likes nothing more than to educate me, in any case, I’m sure plenty of these young feministas heroine worship you over there, I bet you’re a babe magnet

I’m not a babe to them, Ams, I’m an old-school has-been who’s part of the problem, they don’t respect me

then you need to talk to them, Dom, and we should celebrate that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings

how can we argue with that?

Epilogue

Penelope

is hurtling towards her eightieth birthday in two days’ time while hurtling north on an intercity train

she’s trying to read the culture pages of the Telegraph and has come across a five-star review of a play about African Amazons at the National, her favourite London theatre

rave review or not, she’ll be giving that one a miss

she’s travelling first class, wants to enjoy her G&T and salted snacks in spite of her high blood pressure which is probably going through the roof right now with the rabble around her, the class of people who upgrade their tickets on the train for a few quid and then proceed to turn what’s supposed to be a more comfortable and sedate environment for people who can afford it into a nightmare journey of howling brats, drunken beer revellers and the worst offenders, people having very public conversations about private matters on their mobile phones

she wants to tell them all to SHUT – THE – HELL – UP!!!

but even though she’s an OAP, she wouldn’t put it past a lout to attack her, the headlines in tomorrow’s papers

Pensioner Hurled Off Moving Train By Drunken Thug

Penelope finds she has a little less tolerance for people these days except for Jeremy, her partner, who rescued her from the spinsterhood she’d endured for far too long

all those years being unhappily independent when all she ever wanted was to be co-dependent with a lovely man who loved her

just as she was

she met Jeremy at the Tai Chi classes she started in her late sixties which the lovely Dr Lavinia Shaw (sadly retired, a Nigerianman replaced her) had recommended to improve her sense of balance because she kept falling over

the last time was in Waitrose when she hurt her shoulder so badly it took years to heal in spite of steroid injections

you shouldn’t be falling over all the time, Dr Shaw warned her, you’ll end up in a wheelchair, Penelope

point taken

Penelope first tried a local Camberwell Tai Chi class where she was surrounded by impossibly thin young women and beautiful young men with strange Samurai-style topknots – who were after the women

she found a much more suitable class in Dulwich proper (as opposed to East Dulwich) where there was an impressive supply of older gentlemen of a certain ilk

including the one she began to station herself beside, Jeremy, with silver hair and an aristocratic mountaineer face (very Ranulph Fiennes)

a few years older than her and divorced (quickly ascertained, best to), she positioned herself next to him in class as the teacher instructed them to Part the Wild Horse’s Mane, Grasp the Bird’s Tail and Carry the Tiger over the Mountain

Penelope saw off all competitors, reviving the somewhat rusty skills she’d first employed as a teenager to ensnare Giles

she brought Jeremy pears from her garden, and cuttings for the horticultural gaps in his (also quickly ascertained) – hollyhocks, camellia, wisteria

he seemed to like her so she escalated her ambitions and brought him an extremely rare 78rpm recording of Maria Callas, whom he idolized

spent an age searching for it in West End record shops, and told him she’d come across it buried in her own (hastily assembled should he make it back to hers) classical music collection

she sat through numerous ghastly operas with him at the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Aldeburgh, Garsington

as if quite enchanted by the caterwauling on stage

she joined him at Lords and Oval cricket matches and sat through innumerable and interminable said matches acting very interested, helped along by the regulatory Pimm’s in an ice bucket

(it was her duty to uphold such traditions)

Penelope turned herself into a Fun Person, nothing was ever too much trouble where Jeremy was concerned, in truth most things had been too much trouble before she met him

with Jeremy, she became an attentive listener, offered soothing assurances, especially when he described his ex-marriage to Anne

who’d gone from a well-behaved mother and wife in the fifties and sixties to a manhating feminist in the eighties who picked fights with him and disappeared to Greenham Common with women who tried very hard not to look like they were

women she brought into their town house in Kennington as friends, until one day he caught her at it in their bedroom doing something only a man should do to a woman

he’s had relationships since, will never marry again

well, feminism has a lot to answer for, Penelope said in commiseration, quite prepared to betray the cause if it meant finding personal happiness

Jeremy Sanders (MBE)

had enjoyed a distinguished career as a civil servant in the Palace of Westminster in charge of in-house publications, regardless of which political party was ruining, oops, ruling the country, as he often joked (GSOH, Jeremy!)

they were politically aligned (right of centre) and enjoyed debating the main issues of the day: law and order, the economy, the small state versus the nanny state, nationalism, immigration, discouraging social welfare, human rights, encouraging the growth of small businesses and tax breaks to big businesses and big earners, and the protection of personal wealth – her Camberwell villa, bought for a shining halfpenny in the sixties, was now worth seven figures

Penelope only allowed things to get intimate with Jeremy when they’d known each other eighteen months, she really wasn’t going to jump into bed with him anyway, it had been a long time since she’d been seen in a state of undress by anyone other than the matronly bra-fitter at Marks & Spencer