At the Hampstead Theatre, where I am a board member, I was watching Stevie, a play by Hugh Whitemore in which the poetry and life of the writer Stevie Smith are seamlessly woven together. In the play, the poet lives in suburbia with her aunt, her “lion-aunt”, who treats her with the utmost care and keeps her supplied with sherries, ginger nuts, Battenberg and cups of tea.

She is a very tray-bearing sort of aunt. She is an aunt who marks the saving routines of the day: earnest about elevenses, tactful with the tea things, serious about the bedtime snack. She cooks excellent dishes such as best end of neck. The two wear startlingly bright colours as a sort of concession/affront to the very idea of cheer. They read and discuss what’s in the paper. Birds sing. Plants get watered. Bills are paid. Sometimes, on stage, the women snip beans together in the 
sitting room, pans on their knees. It’s a sort of paradise.

When romance threatens to skew or stymie this charming arrangement, it is sent — not without some sadness — packing. Getting married would mean changing personalities and no one wants to do that. I couldn’t help thinking of a couple of lines from Smith’s uncollected works Me Again, which she illustrated with a pen and ink drawing of a naked woman sitting on a bed smoking with a fully clothed man standing by, close to a Van Gogh-ish looking chair: “ ‘All I ask,’ sang out Ivor, ‘is a little peace and quiet: an agreeable wife who is pleasant to my friends; one who occasionally has the room swept, the breakfast prepared, and the expensive bric-a-brac of our cultivated landlord dusted. I am after all a fairly easy fellow.’”

The play seemed to suggest that there is something about living with an aunt that catches at the seriousness of life, gives life its due, in a way that other living arrangements do not. For an artist to have a caretaker of this calibre seemed like an excellent plan. Yet this was no princess/lady in waiting set-up. They both gave as good as they got. Amazingly, it did not ever matter that that aunt dismissed Stevie’s poetry as mere “stuff and nonsense”. She could not have shown more support to its creator, nor sympathy for her sometimes fragile make-up, and that was what mattered most. As age encroached on both of them and their roles reversed, it was all done with great grace and politeness. Everything was careful.

You might think that living with your aunt is something that would only happen if many things went wrong, but in the play it seemed like the best of all possible worlds. By extension, the play seemed to suggest that a quietish life, a smallish life, could be as good as any other sort, whether chosen or fallen into by chance. In fact the play went as far as to make you feel that the life you were living now, with all its strange unbecoming quirks, was a fine one, perhaps the best one. All sorts of existences, whether very conventional or very strange or very both (as the household in the play was) had equal validity. It’s good to be reminded that there are many different ways of being a family.

Watching the play I had that feeling that my cooler, more musical friends had when they first heard the Sex 
Pistols: I thought, I could do that.

I wished, briefly, for a lion-aunt to take care of me.

I am an aunt to about 20 people, ranging in age from two to 37. To some of them I try to be a sugar daddy, to some a grammar tartar. One I have tried to dangle under important people in her chosen profession. Another I have introduced to late-night cabaret. With others I have a more Ant and Bee persona. I would like them to think of me as a slightly more timid Frank Sinatra type with rolled-up sleeves who is well placed to be called upon in emergencies animal, vegetable or mineral and to, I don’t know, right wrongs, rescue and revive.

Will I end up living with one of these children, I wondered, bringing them things on trays until they have to do it for me? If it happens I do hope it’s in Piccadilly.

After the play we went to a Greek restaurant where 18 months ago the owners had a shocking bereavement. Although there is an atmosphere of great welcome and hospitality there is also sadness in the air. The owner and I usually embrace at the entrance as I arrive and as I leave, taking each other’s emotional temperature. Sometimes she sheds a tear while I am holding her.

Are we each other’s aunts? Perhaps we are.

— Financial Times