If Emily Hill is right in her cover piece for the magazine last week headlined ‘The end of feminism’, then women like me are in a whole world of trouble. And by women like me, I mean women over 40. The nub of Ms Hill’s argument was that all the big battles are won. She quoted the sparkling achievements of ‘women in their twenties’ and also ‘the under-40s’, who are out-earning men. What happens to women after they have broken through the glass ceiling is a question for an older, more cynical female writer.

When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of philosophers known as ‘les nouveaux réactionnaires’. The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence.

I remember the exact day my illness first declared itself. Twenty-seven years ago. Thursday 20 October 1988. My then wife and I were at a viewing of Harry Hook’s The Kitchen Toto at the Strode Theatre in Street when I felt a sudden, crippling pain in my back. Being 35 and a grown-up, I tried to ignore it. But the pain came back when we went for a pizza that evening, and I ended up crawling to the gents’, mewling and cawing.