Surely being a Professional Beauty - let alone an ageing one - is one of the most insecure and doomed careers imaginable.

Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

It's received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.

Blakes Hotel in South Kensington was a particular favourite of mine during what I affectionately think of as my Restless Years.

The truth of the matter is, beauty is a specific thing, rare and fleeting. Some of us have it in our teens, 20s and 30s and then lose it; most of us have it not at all. And that's perfectly okay. But lying to yourself that you have it when you don't seems to me simple-minded at best and psychotic at worst.

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.

The Feminist Me says that a woman's right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps.