I am so frustrated by the lilac that grows on the railway embankment, smelling gorgeous but just out of reach. Mrs Miniver has come out in sympathy and changed her colour scheme.

When it's as cold as today, there's no guilt in spending an afternoon wallowing in old-fashioned glamour and glorious Technicolor.

Ava Gardner was thrumming with Sex Appeal, James Mason was brooding, the Costa Brava setting was luscious. Not to mention gowns and gorgeous cars and bullfighters' costumes that made you want to shout - Freeze! I need to get a better look at that fabric.

And if the dialogue was sometimes so overblown that the audience laughed out loud ... so much the better.

They don't make them like this any more.

A sad day, although I knew it couldn't be postponed for much longer. Some weeks ago, in my local Oxfam shop, I fell in crowing triumph upon an old green Virago copy of Palladian, Elizabeth Taylor's hardest-to-get-hold-of novel. And I've been saving it up ever since, knowing that Mrs Taylor and I were coming to the end of a very enjoyable road ...

Although I haven't read all her short story collections, I have now read all of her novels. (And stories, I'm afraid, no matter how good, are simply not the same as a novel.)

But what a strange novel this is (Taylor's second, published in 1946) and I'm glad that I came to it late because it's not the best one to choose if you've never read her before.

It's a quirky satire on romantic novels and literary escapism from real life ... a dash of Northanger Abbey, a lot of Jane Eyre; and Nicola Beauman, in her biography of Elizabeth Taylor, seizes on a clever parallel with Howards End that I can't possibly explain here without spoiling a rather shocking twist at the end of the book.

But, to start at the beginning and the first sentence: 'Cassandra, with all her novel-reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions ...'

Cassandra Dashwood is the orphaned heroine who takes a job as governess to the young daughter of a widower, still haunted by memories of his wife (shades of Rebecca here ... but you'll be playing 'spot the novel' all the way through.)

' "He will do to fall in love with," Cassandra thought.' Her employer is Marion Vanbrugh, no swarthy, growling Mr Rochester, but an effete, upper-class drip with a girl's name. And, of course, he does 'do' to fall in love with ...

Meanwhile, Marion's ne'er-do-well cousin is playing at Branwell Bronte, hellbent on drinking himself to distraction whilst carrying on an illicit affair with the wonderfully vulgar landlady of his local pub. (Another shocking twist at the end of the book when we discover what has driven him to drink.)

You are always aware, as a reader, that these people aren't meant to be real, they are fictional stock characters ... and I have a feeling that Elizabeth Taylor probably got great amusement from writing it.

Very clever. I'm still turning it over in my head hence this muddled review. Don't think I'll rank it amongst my favourite Taylors but I'm glad I read it.

Sometimes I have to give up and admit that I'll never get on with an author that other people cherish. I can understand why John Betjeman admired Barbara Pym. I can see why Jilly Cooper likes her. Philip Larkin allegedly said that he'd sooner read a new Pym than a new Jane Austen. (Did he really? I'm not at all sure that I believe it.)

But this week's BBC Woman's Hour serialisation, of An Unsuitable Attachment, has forced me to conclude that Barbara Pym and I will never form an attachment.

I am not cut out for English vicarage society.

I don't like them.

And they wouldn't like me.

I loved Sebastian Barry's novel A Long, Long Way, about the Great War. So I was keen to catch his new play Andersen's English based on a visit made by Hans Andersen to Charles Dickens' house at Gad's Hill in 1857.

It's all there, as if Sebastian Barry were checking off all that he'd gleaned from biographies. Dickens' cruelty to his wife: tick. Tension between Mrs D and her sister: tick. Dickens' heavy-handed paternity: tick. There's not a footnote unturned. Dickens' home for fallen women: tick. That's not to say that cobbling all this together makes a good play.

Andersen is the fly-on-the-wall whose poor command of English means that he fails to pick up on the friction. But why cast a black actor as Andersen? And then play him as a noble savage?

It was okay. I dozed during the first half. It was better than watching wall-to wall election coverage on television.

Sometimes that's all you can say ... it was okay.

There is a heartaching melancholy in Paul Nash's landscapes, haunted by his experience as an artist of two world wars.

He painted winter seas that are like splinters of ice in the soul.

He died young, having suffered a breakdown after WWI. I wondered if he woke sweating from nightmares. When he paints a ploughed English field, it echoes with the cratered landscapes of Ypres. It is all strangely beautiful; he makes a dump of shattered German aircraft look like billowing waves of the sea.

I was glad that I caught this exhibition just before it closes.

Sometimes I wander around the supermarket, wishing they'd invent a new, edible animal. (Though I've tried alligator, ostrich, kangaroo and jellyfish, I do see why they haven't caught on.)

But I'm a carnivore to my bones so I keep on trying. And I had to try buffalo sausages.

All I can say is that the buffalo is a very chewy and gristly beast.

Even if it tickles me to think of them grazing in English pastures. (Apparently, they're imported from Romania.)

On the other hand, Heston Blumenthal's recipe for steak was as good as it gets. Bacon and egg ice-cream for afters, anyone?