Of everything that I love about this class, I marvel most at the honesty. It is not brutal honesty, but gentle, thoughtful and genuine honesty, spoken with the best intentions to create not only superb writing but to preserve the heart of the writer. What can be better than this?

Then, from the sublime to the ridiculous, I did a bit of surfing to check on the Golden Globes. I’d turned the show on briefly and then turned it off. Life is too short, I thought, to sit here for hours watching screaming people in sparkly dresses and suits hug each other. Now, with a bit of surfing the next day – the best dressed, the worst, various gossip mongers – I got the gist in ten minutes of reading instead of hours of watching. Another little victory for sanity. Not sure I’ll be able to do the same for the Oscars, though every Oscar night, by the end of that marathon, I always ask myself, “Why the #$%&* did I waste my night?” So maybe I’ll give this new way a try.

And a final word on the joys of aging: it has been my privilege, through the years, to have been compared to various actresses. Charles Bukowski the poet, whom I met in Vancouver when I was 25, told me I was a “young Lauren Bacall” – though as he was trying to seduce every nymphet in the room, that might have been a much-used line. (Though I was flattered, it didn’t work with me.)

Later, my mother-in-law thought I looked like Natalie Wood, at least, she did before the divorce, and I was regularly compared to Vanessa Redgrave, which I also found highly flattering if absurd – we are both tall, but she is beautiful with cheekbones and I am interesting with none. But the other day, as I walked into the Y, a man doing push-ups outside stopped and said, “Wow, you look so much like that actress … what’s her name?”

I stood, smiling in a gently self-deprecating way, waiting for “Vanessa Redgrave” and wondering who else might come up … Catherine Deneuve?

“Carol Burnett!” he explained. “That’s it. You look just like Carol Burnett!”

“She’s funnier than I am,” I replied with just a touch of bitterness and went into the Y.