Nevertheless. There is an interweaving of dream and practical goal. On the practical level, the biggest social change in my lifetime in my time and my place has been the opening up of life possibilities in the lives of girls and women. I look around at the daughters of women I know and I marvel. They all seem to be not just more clever but more beautiful and nicer and infinitely more confident than most of my generation ever were. They're doing doctorates in astrophysics or building skyscrapers or working in experimental theatre. Or, even more hearteningly, they thought of doing things like that and went on to thirdlevel and still might do them but at the moment they're hairdressing or running a coffee bar or hanging out with their friends, apparently doing nothing and picking up a bit of work here and there when they need money.

Admittedly, this freedom was achieved only in the first world, and when you consider how many billions of people born female are oppressed by ideologies and religions and violence, you despair that similar opportunities will ever extend to all the women of the world. But the grounds for hope are that, for most of human history, it seemed impossible that it would ever extend to the first world either.

But there is also the level of dream. The daughter of a man and woman I knew in London in the old days - and I was friendly with Mary Cummins afterwards, too, when she came back to Dublin and worked in the Irish Times - turned up recently with a wonderful new occupation. Daisy has become a romance writer. She's written three romances for Mills and Boon, under the name Abby Green, and they're all coming out this year. At the party she threw to celebrate this achievement she gave me the first one. Chosen as the Frenchman's Bride is the title, and on the cover a young man and woman are pressed together in a place with palm trees.

It all came back again, the power of the hot, romantic dream.

I've read a fair few Mills and Boons myself. But you have to suspend more belief than I can suspend to care about them. The nurse in a clinch with the doctor on the cover always ended up married to the doctor. But marriage is not necessarily the goal of a life where there are economic alternatives. And even when I was young I could not identify with the heroines who, while always being overwhelmingly pretty and attractive, acquired their husbands by being honest, kind, modest and whatever other range of virtues best reassured men's insecurities.

And by being thick, if you don't mind me saying so.

Daisy/Abby's first book is a deliberately traditional classic of the genre. The hero, a Frenchman, is a billionaire with 'an innately powerful grace' whose flight suit - he flies his own planes - 'enhances his gorgeous physique' (though I must say I think flight suits look like huge Babygros). And that's just above the waist. There are pages and pages to do with his hardness, semi-hardness et cetera below the waist. The boundary between genteel bodice-ripping and soft porn shifted, to put it mildly, while I was not looking.

Our heroine is also quite something, from her generous bosom to the tips of her endless legs. She gets pregnant - I'm not going to tell you any more than that or I'll give away the plot - and the single most astonishing thing about the book, to a woman of my generation, is that the pregnancy is not only not a tragedy, it isn't even an inconvenience. But then again, the heroine isn't doing anything much. She's a teacher, a substitute teacher, and she's not working at the moment. The billionaire, however, has offices and transcontinental business and mansions all over the place. He has flunkeys and minions and assistants; the heroine has just the friend who didn't go on holiday with her. He is all action, decision, power; the only thing she can do that's of any consequence is, yes, get pregnant. And even that's an accident.

She spends much of the book fluttering around passively worrying about whether he really loves her. Which it turns out he does, on account of her simplicity, innocence, lack of worldly knowledge, virginity, kindliness to her mother and indifference to money and possessions (he has to force jewels on her). Oh, and that she thinks he's god.

So, what's changed? Every single woman who was ever born knows that life seldom delivers impassioned billionaires. It seems an extraordinary paradox that the reality of women's lives in the first world has changed utterly, including the reality of underprivileged women's lives. But still, in fiction, they yearn for a mate who is 'decent, caring and above all will stand by his woman forever' - that's what Daisy says in the friendly email exchanges she and I are having about all this - but who comes swathed in dreamlike fantasies.

What do women want? , Freud asked. Well, they want to be ecstatically loved by someone good, faithful, exciting and rich. Ah, come on, lads. No problem there, surely?