‘…I’m about to part company with my right ovary after 33-and-a-third long years together. I guess that’s as good a place as any to start.’

You met me at a very strange time in my life.

Yeah, but… thinking about it, this aside could apply to my life at pretty much any point over the last three decades. Along with “Go on, Venus, buy that dress/bag/same pair of shoes…You DESERVE it. You’ve been through an ORDEAL.” The problem being, I’ve been going through some sort of ‘ordeal’ or another for the past 33 years.

I sit here alone in my spinster pad, tapping away at my laptop like Carrie Bradshaw, but fatter, poorer and with better facial bone structure, trying to figure out how to introduce myself. I’m as over-educated as Belle de Jour and as over-medicated as Liz Jones. And while I may be a ‘distressed’ blonde, somewhat clumsy and buxom, perennially single British thirtysomething woman, who works in the London publishing world and cannot handle wine, I ain’t no Bridget Jones. I don’t keep a diary and I’m not agonizing over two middle-class men.

But I am sitting here on the eve of what will be my nineteenth operation in eight years. Or is it eighteenth? Unbelievably, I’ve lost count. I’m about to part company with my right ovary after 33-and-a-third long years together. I guess that’s as good a place as any to start. The story of my body’s journey (with those 19 laborious stop-offs on the way, which you’ll have the pleasure of hearing about in later columns) has unfortunately road-mapped the course of my life. Maybe this is true for all of us, in the end.

I was flattered, amused and more than a little baffled to be asked to write this column. Gender politics and body image issues are my specialty – with extensive lived experience and academic knowledge in both arenas. Sex and dating –not so much! I consider myself romantically dyslexic – effectively a case of arrested development when it comes to negotiating the minefield of heterosexual relations.

‘At a time when most of my peers have picked a partner and are trying to wield a pushchair into their nearest organic pantry, I’ve never even learned to flirt with someone in real life.’

At 33, I’m furnished with a more mature perspective than my peers in some respects, as a result of being forced to confront my mortality at a relatively early age. And yet I am embarrassingly ill-equipped when it comes to jousting with the opposite sex. At a time when most of my peers have picked a partner and are trying to wield a pushchair into their nearest organic pantry, I’ve never even learned to flirt with someone in real life. It’s as if I spent my 20s in a deep emotional coma and have just emerged into a world full of online dating, sexting and compulsory ‘hotness’.

So join me…and feel free to watch, point and laugh as I navigate my way through this Brave New World of boys, lingerie and sex toys. We’ve all been there at some point– I’ve just arrived a little later than most, that’s all.