Tina and I were fairly frequent guests at Ailie Munro's famed dinner parties when she lived in Sussex. Ewan and Peggy were also guests on a couple of occasions when we were there. Ailie liked to mix and match from the vast number of people that she knew with academic, media, NGO, folk scene and political backgrounds. On one of these evenings, there were a number of Ailie's fierce feminist friends from the Hove Labour Party. Ewan had been doing most of the talking and it was clear this was getting a frosty reception from some of his listeners.

Ewan left the room, presumably to go to the loo, and one of the Hove group bristled and said, "Doesn't that man have any subject of conversation but himself?" and as you can imagine, that killed all conversation stone dead for quite a while. However, in the context of what had happened up to that point in the evening, it was fair comment.