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wanted to do with her life was live in a croft in Scotland with a seal – she’d read Seal Morning by Rowena Farre. At one point she used to spend entire weekends in a tent in our garden poring over books about subsistence farming and edible berries, with poodle Sammy acting as surrogate sea mammal.
    She had her own little vegetable patch in the garden and assured us, with twelve-year-old conviction, that she could happily live off the carrots and potatoes which she boiled up – with me watching from the kitchen window – on her small Primus stove. However the sandwiches and hamburgers which I left on the window-sill were always eaten, a fact Bruce and I thought it wisest not to comment upon.
    So much has changed. So much has been happening lately that I’ve been tempted to exchange my periodic tizzies for a prolonged and full-blown panic.
    ‘What form would this panic take?’ asked Charlie. ‘I mean, is it going to be an underground thing – like obsessively ordering kitchen accessories from cable TV – or something more dramatic?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled sadly.
    ‘Well, you’ll have to work that one out first and I tell you something Jasmine, the options are vast.’
    ‘I suppose they are.’ I looked at him anxiously.
    ‘I mean, in your case a fairly common scenario would be heavy alcoholic intake followed by deep, drunken existen tial angst and late night dash in taxi back to unfaithful husband.’
    I pulled a face. ‘Yuck.’
    ‘Or fast, desperate involvement with some extra-ordinarily unsuitable man. That’s quite popular too.’
    ‘Yuck again.’
    ‘Or you could be more enigmatic. You could, for example, r un down the road in your nightie screaming the 1989 Norwegian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest.’
    I couldn’t help laughing. ‘And why on earth would I want to do that?’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Charlie, giving me a broad smile.
    Susan says my confidence has taken a knock and I need to get out and about to boost my self-esteem. She thinks coming along with her to a yoga and meditation class is just the job, and so now here I am in my tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt.
    This is my second visit and I’m just about getting the gist of things.
    I know, for example, that in Room 5B of St. Benedict’s High School for Girls we are supposed to be heightening our awareness of our life-force and life-purpose. I also know that we are being bathed in the glow of collective oneness and a feeling of harmony and balance with all things, and that swallowing sounds really noisy in a silent room.
    ‘Are you comfortable?’ asks Arnie, our teacher. This is just politeness – rather like the woman on BBC radio’s Listen with Mother who used to say ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’
    We’re all lying flat on the floor on foam mats and the air is thick with the smell of apple tarts from domestic science class. Susan beside me is furtively sucking a Fisherman’s Friend because she has a slight cold.
    ‘We’ll go straight to the meditation tonight,’ says Arnie, who is not American but has a slightly American accent. You can tell just by the way he sits, with his back straight and knees comfortably but athletically crossed, that he’s no couch potato.
    Arnie then puts on one of his CDs. Strange sub-aquatic sounds emerge from the player – whale s ongs and the bubblings of some synthesiser and then pan pipes and little drumming sounds that grow louder and then burst into a hypnotic, rhythmical beat.
    ‘Listen to the music,’ Arnie says softly. ‘Don’t try to relax. Trying is not relaxing. Just let go.’
    Funnily enough that’s much the sort of thing Bruce used to say to me during our initial love-makings. ‘Just relax,’ he’d say. ‘Just let go.’ ‘Where will I go to and if I get there will I get back?’ I used to wonder. I did occasionally manage this intrepid journey. The small sweet explosions left me feeling rather adrift and forlorn as Bruce, having been