QUITE honestly, if one more person says to me 'just look at Joan Collins, she must be nearly seventy and she still looks great', I may resort to granny rage.

This usually happens if I should mention my approaching sixtieth birthday (an event you'll be getting sicker of as the weeks wear on).

Quite frankly I don't care how old Joan Collins is. I have nothing against Joan Collins, and she does look great, although a little bit of cattiness in me has to say that I wonder just how great she looks just after the alarm goes off at 7am. A bit like the rest of us I suspect.

What I can't understand is why anyone would think it is a comforting thought to someone on the cusp of becoming an OAP that someone else who is presumably already an OAP looks 30 years younger.

I'm a realist. I know that never in a million years and several lottery wins would I look like Joan Collins.

It doesn't do me one bit of good to know that somewhere out there is an elderly lady who still has the figure of a young girl and a toy boy to prove it.

So will you just shut up about Joan Collins, or Ursula Andress, or even dear Felicity Kendall.

I prefer to grow old disgracefully and look forward to the good things of OAPdom. The bus pass, the slightly reduced entry to jumble sales and church fetes, the chance to bore the younger generation with sentences which start 'in my day'. Can't wait.

My eldest daughter tells me she has taken up mosaics as a hobby. This is ideal on an island where you trip over Roman remains around every corner and there are some wonderful examples of ancient mosaics.

The only problem I can see is that she may have inherited the gene which makes it impossible for her not to become totally immersed in the hobby of the day. In other words it could lead from a single lovingly assembled tile to doing the outside walls of the house making them look like a Greek public convenience. We shall have to see.

I suppose we have all inherited it from my mother, whose hobbies included knitting and crochet, both of which she was brilliant at.

The trouble was she never quite knew when to stop and would unpick things to re-knit into other things if she couldn't find any new wool.

At jumble sales you always had to be on the look out for hand-knitted items which she might pounce on because you knew the dreadful full length khaki knitted dress would eventually be unpicked and you might find yourself in an unflattering twin-set from the wool; or a matching set of jumper, gloves and socks from a huge rather tattered cricket sweater. Nothing wrong with this, but later it became a bit of a problem when you found your favourite turquoise polo neck was now a complete baby's layette.

I've been through the hobbies mill myself. I seem to recall it began with patchwork; final result a slightly wonky chair bottom cover initially destined to be a quilt. Macramé, final result one hammock for a plant pot which the pot fell out of the first time it was used and a lot of bits of string to use up. Pottery throwing, not even a final result. Papier maché; an attempt to make a jolly puppet for the children which turned out to resemble a death head mask of W C Fields and never quite dried. Rag doll making; quite a success except the embroider faces always seemed to be leering rather than simpering and were enough to scare a toddler. Rag rug making; rather proud of result until vacuumed the rug, whereupon all the carefully cut bits of rag disappeared up the tube. Proper rug making; kit bought for birthday on my own suggestion because I envisaged a house full of glorious soft luxury rugs. Final result, one six inch square of rug, severely punctured fingers and the realisation that at the rate I was going I would just about finish a doormat by the time my children had left home.

Smell

I could go on all day. Pressed flower decorations; bought frames, flower press, picked flowers. Final result, a small heap of brown violets, brown primroses, brown crocus and bilious green leaves. Home made pot pourri, ditto except a rather unpleasant smell of decayed rose petals. We won't even mention the attempt at batik except to say wax is very difficult to remove from every orifice on a gas cooker.

These days I stick to gardening, where your mistakes can be covered up by saying you are constructing a wild meadow and yes, you do like weeds because they add substance to the garden. My younger daughter is in to stained glass, which means I hide my reading glasses whenever possible.

My last really big and really disastrous hobby was furniture stripping. I blame a friend who was the sort of woman who could go to an auction, snap up an ugly pine table painted in ghastly pillar box red, strip it expertly and turn it into a wonderful softly glowing pine coffee table.

In those days stripped pine was just becoming fashionable but if you bought professionally stripped stuff it occasionally had been overdone and the glue had been destroyed as well as the varnish, so that when you put your favourite Victorian knick-knack dish on it it collapsed into a pile of firewood.

Flat bits

I decided furniture stripping looked easy, and experimented on a small bathroom cabinet. Then on an old kitchen chair. Then on a small table. Not that I finished any of them, because although the flat bits were easy, the grooves and curves were not, and eventually every bit of furniture I tried looked like it had been chewed by a rabid lion and I was banned from buying any more paint stripper before I started on the doors and windowsills.

Since I began writing this I've spoken to my daughter who mentioned that she thought a mosaic mural in the bathroom might look nice. See, it's starting already.