THERE are certain disadvantages in writing this column. For a start, it has to be based on personal experience and I don't exactly lead a glittering lifestyle. Anne Robinson, who writes weekly in a national Sunday paper, is always meeting lots of grand people and attending high flying social events. So she has plenty to write about, and, in case anyone in the wage-deciding department is reading this, gets paid an awful lot of more money than I do for telling people she had lunch with the Queen's second cousin twice removed. Me, I can only latch onto the comings and goings of the family and the cats, which means a lot of people, those who aren't bored with the comings and goings of the cats, know a lot more about me than I realise. I'm constantly surprised by people I really don't know asking me if the ginger cat is now eating Whiskas Supermeat or will he only eat the chicken jelly one. I'm not complaining, it's nice to chat to people. I'm just surprised. I was surprised the other morning when the charming secretary of a local organisation quoted me a bit of a long ago column. In it I had said I didn't exactly relish public speaking although, because talks are booked at least a year ahead, I usually spend at least 11 and a half months in blissful relaxation thinking that it is ages ahead and I don't have to worry until the secretary reminds me two weeks before the dreaded date, then I get into a increasing state of terror. He knew this was true, the bit about reminding me, because he had done just that two weeks before. Now he was introducing me to a group I discovered was all men. I thought that if I'd known that I'd have worn a lower top, although to be honest, people would probably prefer me not to nowadays. In the event they were very kind, even though their previous speaker had been an erudite man who had talked about human transplants, or something like that, and had pictures of human body parts to show them. I didn't have anything as interesting as that, only old copies of the Cornish Times. Perhaps I should arm myself with a few odd slides of people having brain operations just to enliven the proceedings. Another column brought a letter from a young lady who has just started a tanning business in the town. She had read of my memories of long ago tanning practices, especially when I mentioned that some people used to use lard to grease themselves. Not me, I hasten to add, I always preferred good beef dripping mixed with coconut oil. The latter always encouraging a flurry of wasps who thought they'd found a delicious coconut tree. Anyway, she suggested I should try an all-over tanning spray, which is what she does at the Red Hair Salon in Fore Street, Liskeard. Feeling a little silly to be after a golden Mediterranean tan in the middle of Liskeard, I presented myself on a quiet Thursday afternoon. I usually avoid this sort of thing. Years ago my editor on the South Coast paper I was then working for sent me along to a salon in a posh hotel which was offering a then revolutionary slimming technique. He had no such qualms about insinuating that I could do with a little less hip and thigh. These were days before political correction had insinuated itself into every conversation between boss and worker, and – while he didn't exactly say 'Oy fatso, go and try to get an inch or two off that enormous bottom' – he made it clear that I was the likely candidate in the office, and, besides, I was the only woman and who would ever even think that men needed beauty treatment. For goodness sake, he didn't even wear moisturiser. So I found myself sitting in a room decorated in tasteful pink and white, with a young woman clad in a white outfit in attendance, a long low padded table and a black machine with what looked like electrodes hanging out of it on a small table. Apart from the young woman, I could have been in a KGB interrogation room. The theory of this treatment was that if you had electrodes stuck to you with little pads the machine would give your muscles tiny electric shocks and exercise them painlessly. Painlessly? More about that later. The young woman warbled on about how the slack unexercised muscles on your body, although she patently meant my body, would get hours of exercise while I was lying down in a tasteful pink and white room. So, bearing in mind that there were several vacant columns in the paper waiting for the report, I dutifully shed my outerwear and allowed her to attach the bits and pieces to me. I should have been suspicious when she kept emphasising the words painless, comfortable, pleasurable and relaxation. Once attached, she explained that she would start me off with a very gentle session which would just make me feel as if I was gently twitching. She switched the machine on and I felt as if a hundred bees were stinging me at once and made a kind of strangled sound. 'Oops,' she said. Now 'oops' is not a very welcome word in these circumstances. Oops is the sort of word you hear a workman who is outside in the road drilling say seconds before all your electricity goes off or you lose your telephone line because he's been drilling in the wrong place and gone through a cable. Oops is what you hear from the kitchen just after an almighty crash as someone loads just one too many plates onto the draining board and your best china falls to the tiled floor. Oops is a word which either spells disaster and damage or it is a word from someone who doesn't quite know what they are doing. In this case it was the latter and the young woman in white apologised profusely for mistaking the two ends of the dial, the high and the low in this case, and explained that she hadn't really had an awful lot of experience in using this revolutionary new and perfectly safe slimming technique. I mentally replaced the words 'not at awful lot' with 'none'. Fighting down the instinct to leap off the 'treatment' table, which now more than ever evoked thoughts of the KGB, but remembering I had to face an editor with a tape measure, I allowed her to continue and set the machine at a less painful level which was bearable. Then she left the room, and I spent the next half hour twitching and wondering what on earth I was doing lying in a posh hotel, attached to live electricity with my bottom pulsating like a volcano about to erupt. At the end of the session she seemed quite pleased with herself, I was obviously a guinea pig and apart from the slight glitch of nearly exercising me to death, everything had worked well. She said that with regular applications of the electrical torture machine, sorry, revolutionary slimming technique, I would see amazing results. I thanked her, thinking to myself there wasn't a bat's chance in hell of me ever letting anyone attach an electrode to my buttocks again, I left to write a complimentary but slightly wary article in keeping with my editor's need to keep big posh hotels who were good advertisers happy. Because being tan sprayed obviously wouldn't involve any kind of electrode, I wasn't too worried, and it turned out to be a pleasant experience. As I hate lying prone in the sun, ditto on a sunbed, and applying my own fake tan has always left me striped like a zebra, I welcomed an expert and Val Hoare practised long and hard on friends before she started her business. It was quick, painless and surprisingly dry and took less than 15 minutes. I suppose it's a bit vain on my part to want a sun tan, but like a lot of gardeners I get brown only on bits that show, ie arms and ankles, for most of the year, and I'm also aware of the dangers of lying in the sun. Now, with a nice light brown natural shade I needn't risk the midday sun on holiday and can dispense with the lard! When I got home the daughters were most impressed, or jealous, depending how you interpret their reaction. One will be booking her own session, the other was a bit sour because she was going back to Germany the next day and didn't have time. They were a little shocked, as only daughters can be, when I mentioned 'all over tan'. 'What do you mean "all over"? one said. 'Well apart from the paper knickers,' I said. 'Mother!,' they both said in unison. It's one of life's pleasures as you get older that you can reduce your grown-up children to cringing embarrassment.