Approaching her 70th birthday, Gail Rice felt such dread about ageing , and her milestone birthday, that she knew she needed to do something scary and exciting to jump start her battery. She thought about parachuting out of a plane, but then a different idea popped into her head: hiring a sex worker.

She doesn’t know where the idea came from exactly, although a couple of years earlier she’d seen the film Good Luck, Leo Grande , in which Emma Thompson plays a retired school teacher who, in search of post-marital sexual awakening, hires an escort.

Rice, a psychologist living in Sydney, Australia – where sex work has been decriminalised since 1995 – says she’s never been very open about sex, but she told a friend about her idea. He suggested they google some escorts online. “We looked

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