I, An Old Turtle

As, indeed, is Woman of the Hour, Laura Wade.

I never saw Posh, and I laugh myself silly at the insularity of people who believe that a national electoral impact might have been had by a London stage production.

Or even that a national electoral impact might be had by a feature film on general release. Although I shall probably see The Riot Club, if only for its apparent depiction of undergraduates newly arrived at Oxford from the North as previously unfamiliar with cutlery.

My very Yorkshire postgraduate flatmate and I used to joke at Durham that we had never seen knives and forks before we came to university, and we would revel in the hilarity of how many people believed us. I am not talking only about other students.

I should add that the all-male dining clubs at Durham were, and doubtless still are, the quintessence of respectability. "Riotous" would have been the very last word to describe them.

It seems that this centrally cast "girl from a Northern town" has been added because all films need "a love interest", no matter what they are really supposed to be about. Few are the dramatists who can truly do both tragedy and, in the modern sense of the word, romance.

Bringing us to the title of this post.

Laura Wade is the author of a play called 16 Winters, telling us what was done during the interval by Perdita and Hermione; I understand that there is also now a character of that latter name in something else, but I forbid all mention of it in the comments.

That sounds far better.

Ms Wade was born three weeks after I was, and The Winter's Tale was on the A-level syllabus for our year. I have been enchanted by and with it ever since. Clearly, so has she.