Tonight:
5°c
The older I get, the more perverse I grow. It's really very alarming. Take the news that the Garrick Club is to ask its members to vote on the issue of whether the female of the species should be allowed to join.
In principle, my attitude to this storm in an oak-pannelled room is: "Good - and about time, too."
In my heart, you see, I am still the earnest girl who spent her student years trying, and failing, to get The Sun, home of the page three lovely, banned in our college common room - even if I do concede that my footwear is so much more elegant these days (20 years ago, I favoured brown Dr Martens, a stout shoe that perfectly complemented my permanent expression of deep disappointment at the behaviour of men everywhere).
But another part of me is secretly willing the old devils to vote "no".
This is not because I believe that desiccated codgers in pinstripes should be allowed to go on believing that women ruin everything, including decent conversation (the last time the Garrick's members voted on the issue of women, in 1992, Peregrine Worsthorne opined that there would be "tears before bedtime" were women to attempt to indulge in the conversational "jousting" at which he believed the club's menfolk were so amazingly adept).
Nor is it because I believe in the unchanging sanctity of our national institutions - if a club with 1,300 members, three of whom are Donald Sinden, Rodney Bewes and Mark Knopfler, can be said to be a national institution.
If St Paul's Cathedral can have a female canon - the wholly wise Lucy Winkett - I do think that the Garrick Club can cope with the influx of the odd pair of opaque tights into its hallowed bar.
No, it's more childish than this, I'm afraid. The truth is that while I long for women to zoom to the top of the church, the police force and the judiciary, I do think we should leave gentlemen's clubs, which are, after all, not terribly important in the scheme of things, well alone. I worry that they will no longer be fun - and I mean fun FOR US - when we can be members.
I have been to the Garrick twice- women can visit at the invitation of members - and both visits were quite delightful. The suits! The accents! The gentle snoring!
Not since my grandpa took me to his Sunderland crown green bowling club for a glass of lime and lemonade have I felt such a relaxing sense of my own youthfulness, femininity and sophistication. Plus, the ladies' powder room must be seen to be believed.
It's divine. It contains a dressing table exactly like the one I fantasised about having in my bedroom when I was nine years old. And, naturally, there being no women about, there is no need to queue for a cubicle. Unlike the Old Vic, or the National Theatre.
Besides, what kind of women are likely to want to join the Garrick? The girls I know - all of them world-class verbal jousters, since you ask - would rather be eating buffalo mozzarella at the gleaming bar of Bocca di Lupo in Soho than chewing on blue steak in Covent Garden.
My best guess is that if Esther Rantzen is considering joining the biggest gentlemen's club of them all (the House of Commons), it is worryingly probable that she might also start hankering after the likes of the Garrick, too.
She could meet Ann Widdecombe there. And maybe Anne Robinson as well, if she was free.
No, let the men have their club, I say - so long as we can still visit, goggle-eyed and giggling. Sometimes, it's good to be reminded of how far, out in the real world, we have come.
