In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company the drunken Joanne raises a toast to “the ladies who lunch/ ... Lounging in their caftans/ And planning a brunch/ On their own behalf/ Off to the gym/ Then to a fitting/ Claiming they’re fat”. These ladies, to be frank, are the epitome of vain materialism and snobbery. Yet they have proved surprisingly resilient, popping up in the TV show Desperate Housewives and then, shrugging off all those negative connotations, forming an aspirational subgroup in style magazines.

My quarrel is not so much with them as with the implicitly derogatory and frankly sexist use of the word lunch. The kind of repast that these ladies are imagined to indulge in would take place, typically, in a restaurant in a department store, as a spiritually empty, Chardonnay-fuelled break between bouts of shopping. This is, of course, a travesty of the true meaning of lunch.