I have always had an admiration for Neil Tennant, of the Pet Shop Boys. He was a late starter: 'West End Girls' was their first hit and he was 30.

Today, on Desert Island Disks, he was asked about being gay, and what difference it made in terms of seeing the world, experiencing life, and so on. And he replied that the difference between having children and not having children was far greater than the difference of sexual orientation.

This must be another way of putting David Lodge's famous comment: 'Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.' - i.e. sex doesn't actually matter that much.