Eat, pray, die

Best stick to the cats, ladies

A British grandmother was strangled and beaten to death by her Tunisian boyfriend, an inquest heard today. Pauline Richardson, 64, had travelled with a friend to the resort of Port El Kantaoui in Tunisia in June 2008. She was due to fly back on June 29 and on that day visited Qabeel Jabir Al-Wardani, who was then in his 20s. Mrs Richardson missed her flight home and her body was discovered the next day.

There is a tremendous black comedy waiting to be written regarding the growing practice of post-menopausal women desperately chasing sex in the third world. The absurd thing is that they’re uniformly convinced the young con artists who prey upon them have fallen in love with them and genuinely wish to pursue a committed romantic relationship with them, presumably because of their superior if wrinkled white skins. Between the instaslut behavior of the 15-19 year-old on an airplane crowd – only a recent divorcee in her thirties is easier – and this geriatric imperial cougarism, one wonders if it is women’s suffrage or women’s travel that is the worse idea. It is customary to scoff at the Victorians who insisted that women travel with a guardian of some sort, but this sort of thing reminds one that such societal customs usually arise from necessity.