The nicest thing about deadlines is that when you miss them, they won't bother you again, unless there's a nag in the background ( like the government). That's also the worst thing about deadlines, missing them. So it's the end of a busy month and perhaps a few deadlines have slipped by. Oh dear.

When you're half a Luddite like me, and I won't say which half, we're bound to miss a few things unless we have an alert iPhone or iPad or whatever is the most effective watcher/alarmist. It would be lover-ly to have that at one's fingertips but my fingertips are clumsy. I keep losing passwords and addresses and I bog down trying to enter essential information into all these gorgeous, efficient time-savers on the market and in our homes now. But the technical equipment doesn't come with a Person to load in your co-ordinates and all the fiddly details that make your day work.

Years ago in Winnipeg when we were all young mothers with babies, I attended a mother-daughter party, without our children, a festive occasion, a girls' day off. One of our mothers commented on how efficient we all were without any help. One of my friends who had four children protested.

"Oh, but we have help," she said. "We have all these machine - washers and dryers - that do the work for us."

"My dear," said the older woman. "It's so much easier to say to someone (imperiously):

GO, and wash the clothes!"

Yup.

Do you still respect me? I've been thinking some more about that old lady sex blog and my entry. I don't think so! It used to be a given, that gentlemen were not supposed to kiss and tell. Add ladies to that, as they gradually acquired incidents to kiss and not tell about. That governed behaviour after the fact. There's more to it than that.

There's a line in Philip Barry's play, The Philadelphia Story (made into a movie twice, each with a great lady of the silver screen: Katherine Hepburn and Grace Kelly). In the first film, James Stewart referred to the rules of gentlemanly behaviour. Tracy Lord's fiancé has leapt to the conclusion that she slept with Mike, the reporter, the night before, had an affair as the euphemism went. Mike explains that the so-called 'affair' "consisted of exactly two kisses and one rather late swim...After which I accompanied her to her room, deposited her on her bed and promptly returned...." Tracy is miffed, asking whether she was so unattractive, distant, forbidding, as to put him off.

"You were extremely attractive," he says - "and as for distant and forbidding, on the contrary. But you were also somewhat the worse - or the better - for wine, and there are rules about that, damn it."

You see? Rules. At least, there used to be rules.

That's a far cry from the date drug non-gentlemen use to have their way with women these days.

So, I think this old lady will abide by the old rules. Too bad. I might have gone viral.