Grooming oneself with all the crazed compulsion of an under-exercised lab rat in order to hook a rich man and obtain a lush lifestyle makes a certain (albeit seedy) sense.
Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.
The allegedly 'classy' magazines often seem to be in an endless, undeclared competition to see who can climb furthest up the fundament of Gwyneth Paltrow or Jennifer Lopez.
And call me a pig, but isn't it brilliantly refreshing how early the Dutch eat dinner? When they're still laying out the cutlery in achingly hip Barcelona, they're hanging the Closed sign on the restaurant doors of old Amsterdam.
Amsterdam has more than 150 canals and 1,250 bridges, but it never seems crowded, nor bent and bitter from fleecing the tourist.
When actresses jump on the anti-Iraq bandwagon, they often combine down-home momism with an ignorance of Islamist intent which is truly awesome.
As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.
I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.
Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill.
It shouldn't come as any surprise that those who choose acting as a profession are phonies who live in a fantasy world. What is surprising is how many of them are blissfully unaware of it.
In my third husband I had discovered a blissfully laid-back type who thought it nothing less than hilarious when I misread the map on the way to Wales, so it took us an extra three hours, or when I was sick in a plastic carrier bag during much of the drive back from Devon - a bag that turned out to have a hole in it.
Is the raggle-taggle Brangelina tribe any more bogus than that of the landlocked yummy mummy who believes that she can drop half a dozen brats and still keep a modest carbon footprint? I don't think so.
It must be said that Brighton, unlike London, makes driving seem very appealing. Instead of glowering faces and angry horns on all sides, we have the coast road in front of us and the Sussex Downs just 10 minutes behind us.
I know that Brighton is famously a mixture of the seedy and the elegant, but in the summer of 2001 seediness swamped elegance hands down.
When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common.
It may be a cliche, but it's true - the build-up to Christmas is so much more pleasurable than the actual day itself.
One Christmas build-up tradition, however, has totally bypassed me - that of going up to town and 'doing a show.'
It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.
I almost choke on my popcorn when I hear film stars, who walk on red carpets as much as the rest of us do on zebra crossings, criticising youngsters who crave fame.
The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.
