As a child, I used to lie in bed waiting for my mother to say goodnight to me. It was a time of day quite as agonising in its own small way as Proust’s nightly longing for his mother’s kiss, but, unlike Proust’s anticipation, mine prompted distracting observations about gender, ageing and the body. My mother’s knees creaked. That’s how I knew when to expect her arrival in my bedroom. Like an aeroplane coming in to land, the noises were at first distant and then louder and then very loud, until they stopped as she cruised down the corridor to my room. This was the difference between my mother and my father coming to say goodnight: one creaked and the other didn’t. So was there something about women getting older that meant their knees creaked?

Some story about women, ageing and bones is inevitably prompted by a fracture such as the one I (then a 57-year-old woman) incurred at White Creek Lodge. Old women break their bones because the skeleton, some 10%-15% of our body weight, is living tissue. Our skeletons live and die, and prosper or not, just like the rest of us. Bone loss begins in the thirties, after which the fate of our skeletons is all downhill. This is true for men as well as women, but women’s skeletons also have to deal with the withdrawal of bone-protecting hormones at the menopause. Skeletal fragility has become part of what it means to be an older woman in Western culture. When the ice at White Creek Lodge broke my arm, I thought I would be blamed for not having looked after my bones properly, for having allowed deterioration and disintegration, so that disasters were just waiting to happen. In fact, American law doesn’t allow flaky bones to be part of a legal counter-attack, but this didn’t stop the White Creek Lodge’s lawyer from trying hard to suggest that a back problem I’d had two years before the fracture meant that the condition of my bones was suspect. Had I had surgery for the back problem? Had I ever broken anything before? Or since? Was I, in other words, inherently crumbly?