Read The Widow's Tale for Free Online Page A

proportion of the population aren’t particularly keen on going to the dentist in the first place and ready to latch onto any excuse which comes their way. The same report claimed that due to the hike in dentists’ prices we’re increasingly inclined to indulge in a bit of DIY dentistry, citing one character from somewhere like Leicester who’s extracted a dozen or more of his own teeth with a pair of pliers.
    Now I think most people would agree that check-ups, at the very least, should be free to everyone, especially those who are short of cash. But it’s equally clear that the fellow to whom they referred is a certifiable nutcase. And that if he hadn’t been pulling out his teeth with a pair of pliers he’d’ve only got up to some other form of self-mutilation, like lopping off his toes with a pair of secateurs.
    Anyway, the obsessive buying and/or reading of newspapers has always struck me as a peculiarly male trait. Along with hushing one’s wife in mid-conversation to listen to the news on the radio, as if this was all dreadfully important and the newsreader was addressing them personally.
    I’m not entirely sure where it comes from – this rather inflated sense of self-importance regarding current affairs. It’s perfectly admirable, I’m sure, to try and keep abreast of what’s going on, both nationally and internationally. But at the very heart of it there is, I think, a delusion of mammoth proportions, which is that by keeping up with the news one is in control of it, and therefore in control of the whole wide world.
    Perhaps it goes back to all that Evelyn Waugh/P. G. Wodehouse gentlemen’s clubs stuff. Perhaps, when men sit in their favourite armchair on a Sunday morning and plough through some impenetrable piece about what’s cooking in the Ukraine or Tanzania, they imagine themselves akin to some cabinet minister.
    Whatever it is, it’s clearly in their chromosomes. When the health department of the local council has to break into some semi-derelict house because of the terrible smell and the fear of conflagration, is it ever a woman they find lost among the towers of rotting newspapers? No. Generally speaking, it is not.

I once went on a retreat, when I was in
    I once went on a retreat, when I was in my mid-twenties, to a convent somewhere out in the Welsh borders. Considering that this must have been during the late sixties and all the other sorts of retreats that would have been open to me, electing to hang out with a bunch of nuns seems like a terribly conservative choice. But given that most of the alternatives would probably have involved me sitting in a circle with dozens of other people, talking about their feelings and, no doubt, some beardy guru doing his best to try to get into your pants, I can still see why I made the decision I did.
    I was never particularly religious, and there was never any danger of me signing up for full nun-dom (not that they would have wanted a young woman as soiled or worldly as me, I’m sure). But I was certainly curious – about a life reduced to such simplicity … mainly solitary, predominantly silent, and almost entirely spent in devotion to something outside of oneself. I can’t be the only person ever to wonder if there isn’t some solace to be had in such a life.
    Anyway, I recall turning up and a certain disappointment that instead of being given a cell with a bare floor on which to sleep I was shown into a fair-sized room, with a large desk and a sink in the corner and a single bed, complete with mattress and sheets and everything.
    I don’t believe it was an order with a strict vow of silence, but personal contact was so minimal and there was so little to say on the few occasions I did encounter anyone else that I’m sure I mustn’t have uttered more than a handful of words the whole time I was there.
    When you’ve finished your breakfast and you’re back in your room by six-thirty there can suddenly seem to be a great many hours in the