Increasingly Long Walks

I see A.L. Kennedy is being theatrically miserable again, in an Observer interview. 'I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17... If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no one else to talk to, what else are you going to do? I've got vast amounts of time to occupy.'

She has a special chair to write in, her interviewer tells us, in which her knees are above her heart.

'She told me she wasn't good company and when I objected that this simply wasn't true, she conceded, "for a limited period, OK. But I get bored very easily. If you were around all week, I'd want to kill you. I wouldn't tell you, even: I'd just go for increasingly long walks.'