Cautionary tales: 3

In a rare bout of optimism, she was foolish enough to think that she could change careers late in life to one that paid more than the minimum wage. She chose something she'd been good at when she was younger but whether through age related atrophy or early onset dementia she wasn't good at it any more. This left her so lacking in confidence that she was unable to manage any kind of work so she survived first by selling furniture, then by selling the cats to a Belgian waistcoat manufacturer and then by selling her flat. She moved into a dustbin where she shortly died, crushed under half a hundredweight of unwanted flyers for an amateur drama group who failed to sell any seats for their performance of Macbeth (the three thousandth production of that play that year at the Fringe).

Cautionary tales: 2

The success of her poorly written trilogy about sadomasochistic sex took her as much by surprise as anyone but she was even more surprised when one of her readers, an unmarried gentleman from Tooting, whose failure to marry or form a normal relationship probably had something to do with his propensity to take everything literally, abducted her one day from her newly purchased £3m mansion. He confined her in his basement, which if not red, was certainly somewhat painful for there was nothing else in there but his electricity meter, not even a bed. He disciplined her daily, applying a hairbrush vigorously to her matronly and capacious haunches and fed her using the gavage method. At one point the police thought they might be able to locate him when he posted a photo to Twitter which showed in one corner the serial number of the electricity meter next to her reddened and scarred rear but unfortunately he was a customer of EDF so to this day she is still missing, although this is not viewed as a major loss to the British literary establishment.

Cautionary tales:1

At the last wedding she went to, she caught the bouquet. That meant she'd be the next to get married. Unfortunately no-one could be found who was willing to marry her, not for large financial reward, not even on the pain of death. There were no more marriages throughout the kingdom for the remaining 45 years of her life. Eventually Interflora paid for a hitman from their marketing budget and just to make doubly sure she was married post mortem to the corpse of an illegal immigrant who had been decapitated when his bicycle went under a lorry on the A1. On this occasion the Border Agency did not send the police to disrupt the ceremony.