Yesterday was Sunday, which means one thing, and one thing only: newspapers. A neat stack of them, from which the sports and business pages have been carefully excised (yes, I know, I should read it all but I just can’t find the time!). I’ve taken to buying the Observer for its brilliant magazines and great journalists, the Sunday Times for the all-too-rare sightings of that delightful creature, Ariel Leve, and the Sindo for. . . well, I’m not quite sure. Maybe so that I can have something to be crotchety about for the rest of the week (this week’s choice cut: the SoCoDu kids waxing lyrical about the recession at the gates of Trinners. . . major voms, loike).

This week’s Sunday Times featured an investigative-type piece on Jade Goody. I say “type” because its investigative powers were limited by the fact that it didn’t really expose too much. Hospitals refuse to talk, the subject herself is dead and obviously there’s a lot of protectionism going on.

What it did make me painfully aware of was the importance of getting a smear test. The last one I had, in 2004 or thereabouts, came back “abnormal” – which, I was told (on the phone), was “perfectly normal”. Oxymoron much? I was told to come back in a year, but I never did; I forgot, it didn’t seem important and, as the years went by, I decided to wait until I was 25, when I could go for free (because us under-25s don’t get cervical cancer, duh). I realise now that all of the above is stupid, but what struck me about the article is that it singled out lower-class women as being particularly vulnerable and unlikely to go back for tests. They need to be cajoled, y’see, encouraged to return. They find the whole experience traumatic and confusing, the poor mites.

Us middle-class ladies, on the other hand, love having people probe inside our vaginas and find the whole process enlightening and delightful, and it provides excellent subject-matter for lunch with the girls in Avoca. So I must make an appointment. Speculum, here I come, and all that.  This could be deemed an overshare but, really, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about; a vagina’s a vagina unless it’s a rotting clump of cancerous cells, at which point, well, embarrassment’s a bit redundant, isn’t it?