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.

Click here to purchaseGood 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