Life is joy and life is pain. At a certain age one must accept that and just go with it. The tears will still fall, and the need for escapism will take over at times – like on a drizzly night in London on the Kings Road for example.

It was book club night and we were to discuss my selection for 2023 – established in December last year at the home of our late, dear, too suddenly departed leader, Alison.

“Sarah, have you read this book you’ve recommended for November?” one of my fellow members enquired quizzically last month as we concluded our discussion on October’s gripping fiction-based-on-fact oeuvre. “Um, no” I replied sheepishly, “but where the Financial Times goes, I will often follow”

Over the coming month I read it with trepidation. Would it fall flat like my recommendation last year – or would it engage and evoke a meaty discussion – the kind that only feisty, independent and intellectual women truly value? The heat was on.

It was and is a page turner; lascivious in an ‘erotic/crime’ genre kind of way – if indeed that is a genre. It struck me as exceedingly contemporary in style, risqué in content and not quite the norm for our usual Women’s Institute gathering. My fingers worryingly turned the pages in the way that only a page-turner warrants.

Cometh the hour, cometh the WI book club member’s meeting. I put down my glass of bubbles and read my research on the author to the assembled group. We started to talk. It all came flooding out – as tends to happen during this salubrious gathering once a month.

The manager of the bookstore walked down the stairs and tentatively approached: “Um, excuse me ladies but I’ve got a customer upstairs who’s heard you talking about the book and is intrigued to know what it is?”

We tittered, only too happy to share.

An hour later, fulfilled to the extent that a moment of joy in a vat of pain can provide, I started to walk towards the tube, Tesco bag containing left-over wine in hand.

A red velvet rope indicating a private art view in a concrete warehousey space caught my eye. I approached, a man opened the rope and asked me in.

The art collaboration on view was called ‘Instinct’. Someone poured me a glass of Veuve and I walked across rough-hewn concrete floors and down steps to experience a familiar sense of deja vu.

“This is taking me back to Art Basel in Miami 2003” I said to the curator and artist – Tilo Kaiser.

“Ah, I was there too” he replied. He hadn’t shown at that time he told me, but partied.  I related, recalling spending five hedonistic filled days where all I’d eaten were peanuts and all I’d had to drink was champagne. And, the dancing; always the dancing.

I thought about the denouement of my book tonight where the protagonist got everything she wished for and more but in the end it wasn’t enough. In the end she yearned for a previous quieter life, warmth and safe nights: despite the simultaneous experience of losing and loss it had been real. Perhaps reality, however mundane sometimes, however sad, is actually it after all.