Tonight:
5°c
Dr Johnson set the mark surprisingly high. He told Mrs Thrale that “a woman has such power between the ages of 25 and 45, that she may tie a man to a post and whip him if she will”.
Twenty-five certainly seems late for women to start being able to exert power over men — and, in turn, perhaps 45 is late enough for this power to fail? Especially given that in the 18th century there were no antibiotics or Botox, retinol or Pilates, to keep anybody, male or female, looking young.
The more common sell-by date for women these days, I am sorry to report, is 40. Or earlier? Shane Watson, after many long years as a columnist hymning the fulfilments of the single life, has pulled off a reverse ferret. She has published a book called How to Meet a Man After Forty. But, on the cover, a funny little asterisk on the word “Forty” leads to a wounding footnote in very small type — “or Thirty”.
Remarkably, Watson herself has succeeded in landing a bloke in her mid-forties, so the book is in part perfectly natural bragging about her exploit, as though she had climbed Everest without oxygen or rowed the Atlantic single-handed. Feminine competitiveness being what it is, other columnists have been boasting, too, about securing a man late in life, while generously letting fall to their less fortunate sisters a few tips about how they might best pull off the same miraculous feat.
Happily they have no need actually to say “be as pretty as me”, since the byline picture does that for them. The advice they do give, though, makes richly enjoyable reading for a man nonetheless. Obviously, we're supposed to be discouraged by such specific and excluding titles and not study such stuff at all. But books are always ending up in the wrong hands, aren't they?
The advice given here to women can be fairly summarised as: don't be so picky and flirt like crazy. However much you think you are flirting, quadruple it, says Watson. Laugh a lot, be intensely interested, be very impressed, all that. It's superbly retrograde stuff.
To be sure, it implies a fairly low view of men. In fact, Watson remarks that men are so generally insensitive they don't notice anything less exaggerated. “Men are all Helen Kellers in the context of flirting,” she says, itself perhaps not the most sensitive or flattering of comparisons.
But no matter. We don't mind such disparagement, if we even notice it. For what we have here is nothing less than total surrender at the last ditch.
The delusion that happiness was to be found in a Sex and the City-style life of squealing “Oh my god!” about shoes while finding most actually existing men woefully inadequate harmed a generation of women. Now it's over. It was all wrong. The whole time.
Nothing could prove that more poignantly than such abject counsel, from women for women, on how, at the very last moment when it still might just be possible, by a feminine adaptation of extraordinary rendition, to tie a man down. Kinder to look away, chaps?
Sarko's novelty floor show
The ever-active President Sarkozy is doing his bit for equality. He has been working hard on his pelvic floor exercises, something undertaken routinely by French women after childbirth but not previously often attempted by men.
No excuses any more. Leading by example, he is an inspiration to us all. As his personal trainer has put it, “the perineum is the floor of our body and if it's not kept in shape it's as if you had a house with no floor” — and we surely don't want that.
Is it too much to hope that our own politicians might enhance their fitness for government in the same way? Gordon Brown has been looking none too bouncy these past weeks. He has much on his mind, of course. But mens sana, don't you know? And we're all just about ready to try anything now.
A rude Wossy rules
Jonathan Ross returns to our screens tonight, professing to be sorry. “Seriously, I would like to apologise — we've got a great responsibility, what we do is privileged and I will be more aware in future.”
I suspect and hope that in saying this he is being wholly insincere. When, in the future, we look back at these past three months, in which we have suffered economic disaster on a scale that is going to continue to damage us all severely for years ahead, the great witch‑hunt against Ross and Russell Brand for their tasteless prank is going to seem not just irrelevant but virtually inexplicable.
What on earth were we thinking? How silly was that? The sooner Ross returns to all-round rudery the better, I say.
* To the wonderful exhibition of late works by Mark Rothko at Tate Modern which closes on
1 February.
It's not just a show not to be missed — it makes me sad to think that when these pictures leave London, I won't be able to see them again unless I go to them, in Japan and New York. At least we can return to the permanent installation of the nine Seagram murals Rothko donated to the Tate.
The exhibition is as thronged as it deserves, yet for once the crowds don't impair the visit. For, quite visibly, nearly all the people here, whether or not they knew much of Rothko before, are hushed by what they are seeing. They seem not just moved but stilled, chastened even. In its way, it's appropriately a communal experience, spiritual as well as visual. I can't remember when the dynamic of an exhibition last struck me this way.
