Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.

Give a bull grass, sweet water and a willing heifer and he is happy. But a man is never content. If no gadflies of worry exist he will invent them.

New York lesson 1 – never look lost. Lesson 2 – forget hallowed silences. It’s the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.