Ashton Applewhite is a ‘writer and activist’ and she has had another epiphany. The last one was that the institution of marriage is a white heterosexual male capitalist trick to enslave women. The inspiring, enlightening, liberating book that followed was called Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well. This most recent epiphany is about how white heterosexual male capitalists marginalise the elderly, chiefly by brainwashing the rest of us into holding bigoted attitudes towards them. This Chair Rocks is Applewhite’s one-woman ‘crusade’ to lift the burden of unthinking prejudice from their bent backs by exposing the underhand methods by which monolithic white heterosexual male capitalism succeeds in controlling our thoughts to further its evil, oppressive ends.

As a new old person (I’m sixty-two and already losing pipe), I hope she wins. And if Commissar Applewhite pulls it off by making the world conform to her latest revolutionary insight, my fellow dotards and I can start waxing our surfboards in readiness to ride the crest of a