uch events, watching everyone else laugh and glide around with an ease you desperately envy. You may realise at some point, or try not to realise, that you are at the bottom of the social pecking order, your presence yielding more pity than pleasure. You might even have made everything worse by turning up wearing the wrong kind of dress, all hope for a night of fairytale glamour dashed the minute you entered the room and noted the dissonance between your outfit and everyone else's.
