Despite paying thousands of euros a year into the French pension and social security system, we are under no illusion that they will give us any money when we’re older and even greyer. So we have been vetting the children.

“Which of you will look after us when we’re old?” asked Rupert the other day.

“Bea will be no good,” said Olivia, “she’ll be too busy with her boyfriends.”

“What about you? You’ll look after us, won’t you?” he asked.

“Only if you’re good,” she replied.

So parental truth number eight is this. Although your children have the right to drive you mad and behave as badly as is possible for twenty years or more, you do not. But I guess we have had our turn with our parents.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2008

I am pleased to annouce that I am incredibly posh. The reason I know this is that none of my friends have central heating. It is a well known fact that the posher you are, the colder your home is. In fact one of the friends I stayed with in London during this visit didn’t even have hot water, so she must be almost royal. Last night I was unable to sleep because my nose was so cold. I’m all for getting into the seasonal swing and all that but do I need to look like Rudolf?

I am now on the train on my way back to France. My final Christmas party was the Daily Mail one. I met Shere Hite there, author of the famous Hite Report on Female Sexuality. I had always imagined she would be rather academic and serious. Not a bit of it. She made Joan Collins look natural.

She had obviously had a lot of work done. At a guess I would say at least one face-lift, lots of lip implants and botox. She looked insane. She looked scary. She looked older than her 65 years. I suppose the rest of us should be grateful to her. Not only because she talked openly and loudly about the importance of the female orgasm, way back in 1976, but because she is a prime example of a truly terrible approach to ageing.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I brushed my teeth this morning as the Ligurian countryside flashed by. I am on a night train bound for France after two days in Florence. The night train does not compare with the luxury of the Grand Hotel, and the view of Liguria may not be as dreamy as the one I had of the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio, but as a method of travel it is marvellous. I got into my bunk at midnight and woke at 8am. That happens about once a year at home.

I was rather tired. The office party the night before was great fun. “Don’t get drunk,” my mother emailed to tell me just before I left my room to join the others in the bar. And for once I didn’t. We ate in a restaurant that doubles as a museum during the day. I was sitting opposite a fresco of Dante having a conversation with Boccaccio. After dinner we went to a nightclub. Yes, you did hear me right. I went to a nightclub. And there discovered another advantage of getting older. I never have to go to one again.

The music was loud (funny that) and that sort of house stuff I loathe. They played one song Tamsin (a colleague from The 7 Arts) and I could sing along to and we danced happily. But then it was back to the dreary deep thud of monotonous music I’m sure even young people don’t want to listen to. Wouldn’t they prefer some Abba? Or maybe some Banarama? I know I would. And most of the pretty young things looked bored out of their minds.

As far as I can make out the point of a nightclub is this. If you’re a girl you show up wearing as little as possible and dance nonchalantly hoping one of the boys will come and pick you up and take you away from this meat market. If you’re a boy, you stand around posing and drinking and assessing the talent. I guess for women the ultimate aim is to be picked up by someone who marries you, thus making another visit unnecessary.

As we walked back to the hotel through the streets of Florence in the early hours of the morning I couldn’t help wondering if nightclubs had been around in Dante’s day the Inferno would have been even scarier.

Before I get to Nice, I must just tell you the best line of the trip. Ben, my boss, was looking up at the statue of David (the real one in the Accademia) when he said “Jeez, look at the size of him. Imagine how big Goliath must have been.”

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

My mother has recently started thinking about ageing. She tells me she would rather be dead than old. It’s a fair point. Having just written a book about ageing I know there aren’t many upsides. One is that the hair on your legs grows at a much slower rate. This is probably not much comfort if you’re a bloke. It also does not make up for no teeth, wrinkles, memory loss and a whole host of other irritating side-effects of age. What’s the point in having sleek legs if your face looks like W.H. Auden’s with a hangover?

I do not fear for my mother. She has always ignored the inevitable and will continue to do exactly as she always has done; that is live life as energetically and eccentrically as possible, until she is either arrested or immobile or possibly both. She is a great example.

Last night I saw another woman who has inspired me and made me less fearful of ageing. Rupert and I took the girls to see Marianne Faithfull in Beziers. She was absolutely brilliant. I am not a big concert-goer. I have been to about two in my life; David Bowie and Bananarama. I was reluctant to go, preferring to be tucked up in bed at 10pm, not singing along to rock songs.

But I am thrilled that we went. The girls loved it. Olivia rather sweetly kept waving at Marianne who sadly failed to spot her. She also didn’t hear Rupert’s response when she said “I hope you can understand me, I can’t speak French.” “Say it in broken English,” he suggested.

I had goose-bumps listening to her sing, thinking about her life and what a woman she must be. She really did “drive through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair” unlike her unfortunate heroine Lucy Jordan.

Marianne Faithfull is sixty-one, almost the same age as my mother. She has lived through drug addiction, Mick Jagger and breast cancer. She has an incredible presence. I felt I was looking at an an icon. There were times when she had to reach for her glasses to read the lyrics. She often took a sip from a mug of tea while the guitarist played a riff. She wasn’t prancing around the stage pretending to be sixteen. But she was having a great time, and so were we.

My point is this. Being over sixty is no excuse to stop doing what you love. My mother knows this and so do I, thanks to her and Marianne.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

Teenagers may not be much use around the house, but they’re brilliant at everything to do with mobile phones. I now have a choice of funky new ring tones, thanks to Julia. My husband says this is yet another manifestation of my mid-life crisis.

According to Wikipedia, the mid-life crisis lasts between three to ten years in men (perish the thought) and only two to five in women. The most common age for it to begin is 46. So unless I am precocious my new ring-tone is just a sign of general madness.

Researchers say that a male mid-life crisis is likely to be triggered by work and a female one by the onset of the menopause (yet again we draw the short straw). According to a mid-life crisis website I have been reading symptoms include depression, excessive consumption and alcohol abuse. I always thought symptoms were extra-marital affairs with younger men or women (or maybe both if you’ve got it really bad), driving convertible sports cars very fast and wearing unsuitably youthful clothes. How times have changed.

Must dash now, my phone is ringing. Actually it’s not ringing, it’s singing ‘I’m too sexy for my shirt’. Mid-life crisis - moi? Never.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I am happily installed in the Hotel Alla Noce in Limone, a town on Lake Garda. I am here to finish my next book and have chosen this place due to a gene they have that means they live longer. Apparently ten per cent of the population is between 100 and 110 years old.

So far I have seen no old people or evidence of longevity. What they seem to have though is a control freak gene. Staying at the hotel is a little like boarding school. You can’t eat here, you can’t put your feet there, you can’t sit at that table, you can only eat breakfast inside and so on. Maybe it is their control freak nature that keeps them young, in which case I am going to live to 150.

Good news from a reader in England. She was recently divorced but has found a new man, in part thanks to one of my books. “I think Two Lipsticks & A Lover helped me snare him actually,” she writes. They are now going to move, with her young daughter, to Provence where they will spend the winters; I assume investigating her matching underwear.

It was lovely to get such a nice letter. The past week I have had a lot of hate mail due to the latest Sunday Times column. Even from someone called Reginald. Actually the bitterness of his letter was offset by the joy I felt at the fact that there still are people called Reginald alive and kicking. Maybe he has the famous Limone gene?

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007