SANDRA PARSONS: Life's too short to worry (now that I'm 50)

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You can still be over 50 and glamorous, as actress Kim Cattrall has shown

A couple of weeks ago, I turned 50. I can't pretend it was a birthday I looked forward to, especially as my five decades have coincided almost exactly with a period of history when our culture became fixated on youth.

I was born at the start of the Sixties, the decade that didn't just celebrate youth but sanctified it. The result was that women in middle age - our mothers - became not just invisible, but often irrelevant.

They had briefly bloomed and then faded away: the world belonged only to the young.

For young, of course, read sexy. Today, one-fifth of all advertising in the Western world uses sex to sell everything from cars to coffee.

I doubt there's been a single day since the Sixties when women haven't been exhorted to use this cream to plump up their wrinkles, or that dye to disguise their grey hairs.

Like most woman of my generation, I've read countless articles on how to stave off ageing - by exercise, cosmetic surgery or the clever use of make-up.

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I've been to yoga, Pilates and the gym. I've watched my diet and heeded Coco Chanel's dictum that women look old when they dress too young. I've been patronised by older men, ignored by younger men and pitied by younger women.

But there are signs that the tide is turning. The fashion industry! , for a start, is finally waking up to the fact that women over 50 have the greatest spending power.

That's why new campaigns for Marks & Spencer, Clarks and Toast all feature gorgeous models in their 40s and 50s, and why Mary Portas is 'on a mission against mumsiness' with a new shop selling fashionable clothes for older women.

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Meanwhile, the new chairman of the BBC, Chris Patten, says he would like to see more women like his 'beautiful, 66-year-old' wife on TV, and actor Nigel Havers, 59, has made headlines with the truthful observation that men his age have nothing to talk about with younger women: 'They go to Glastonbury, which is my idea of hell, and listen to bands I've never heard of, and get wasted.'

It's a shame that it's taken a man of nearly 60 to make this crashingly obvious point.

Nevertheless, we should be grateful, and in case you're one of those 30-somethings who lives in fear of her first wrinkle, let me spell it out for you: we women over 50 are, for the most part, energetic (all that exercise), attractive (all that beauty advice) and interesting (all that life).

Not only that, we're also the ones having the most fun.

Shirley Conran told us 35 years ago that life's too short to stuff a mushroom. But we've also learned that life's too short for almost every other anxiety that preoccupies so many younger women today.

It's too short to waste looking for Mr Perfect, when you could have Mr Perfectly Normal instead, and definitely too short to fret about owning the right handbag.

It's too short to spend time worrying about How She Does It - spend that time thinking about how you do it, instead. And it's also too short to drink cheap plonk or put up with a toxic friend. Oh, and too short for petty jealousy, leather trousers, pretentious must-read novels, boorish behaviour, Facebook or Twitter.

Most of all, it really is too short to spend inordinate amounts of time and money in! pursuit of youth. Diane von Furstenberg - the 64-year-old designer who gave us the wrap dress, perhaps the single most female-friendly item of clothing of the past 30 years - said at the weekend that she was shocked at the number of people who'd urged her to have a facelift.

She's resisted - 'I'd rather be who I am. I think that's easier than trying to not be me' - and has instead taken the advice given to her by celebrity fashion photographer Mario Testino: a smile is an instant facelift.

So now that I've officially become an invisible woman, I will be smiling more and genuinely looking forward to the future. Or, as my ten-year-old son put it in his birthday card to me: 'Don't worry, Mum - you've still got another 35 years to live.'

Thank God Michael Winner didn't carry out his threat to wear pyjamas at his wedding. Most people's nightmare would be for the world to see them in their jim-jams. Mine is seeing Michael Winner in his.

You can take the girl out of Croydon...

Kate Moss: Croydon girl

As a teenager, I never went into central London from my home near Croydon without feeling that somehow I'd managed to get the latest look all wrong. The outfit that had looked so good in the mirror of my suburban bedroom suddenly looked dull and utterly lacking in style.

I imagine that's a feeling Kate Moss, herself a Croydon girl, has never experienced. She was spotted aged 14 and has been a fashion icon ever since. Part of her job description is being able to break the fashion rules and still look good, so that others follow her style.

No doubt this is what she was intending to do when she wore tight denim jeans with a denim shirt to London Fashion Week. But, actually, she just managed to look like the owner of a riding school. Or - much worse - like a girl from Croydon. . .

Crashing Downton earth
The new series of Downton was entertaining enough, and heaven knows the country needs some escapist fantasy to leaven the grey skies of austerity, even if viewers end up watching it swathed in blankets because they can't afford to turn on the central heating. But it desperately needs better dialogue and a less obvious plot.
Hugh Bonneville struggled to make 'the war's reaching its long fingers into Downton and scattering our chicks' sound anything but risible.
Lady Sybil's 'sometimes it feels as if all the men I ever danced with are dead' and footman Thomas's 'what would my mother say, me entertaining the future Earl of Grantham to tea?' were dismayingly hackneyed.
Meanwhile, O'Brien's turning into a one-dimensional pantomime baddie and Bates is starting to be annoying. His decision to sacrifice all for the sake of the Grantham family looked foolish and weak, not noble.
Yes, the acting's first class - which is why we'll all still be tuning in next week - but I'm afraid that without more depth and dramatic twists, this Downton's going to run out of steam quicker than Mrs Patmore's kettle.
The fashion world have had it in for the Duchess of Cambridge for some time now. Vivienne Westwood sniffed that her image was 'ordinary woman' and now New York's fashion pack have derided her as a woman who 'wouldn't stand out in a crowd' if she wasn't Royal.
Funny, then, how at the Emmys, actress after actress took to the red carpet in long, pale pink sequinned sheath dresses, almost identical to the one first worn at a charity function earlier this year by . . . Kate.

Posh's mini fashionista

Victoria Beckham and baby Harper Seven shopping at Prada in New York

Victoria Beckham says that contrary to what most people think, she does have a sense of humour. So when she said this week that her ten-week-old baby dau! ghter, H arper, loves fashion, adding: I took her to Prada shopping the other day and I could tell she was thinking: Mummy, Im home, I assumed she was joking.

But no. It seems that Posh was merely using her baby to help promote her latest fashion range. Which might be funny, if it werent so desperately sad.

Mick Jagger says he wont be writing his autobiography. I dont particularly want to rummage though my past. I think its a damaging psychological exercise. Given his serial infidelities, Im sure thats true. What a shame that at the time he didnt think about the psychological damage he might have been inflicting on the long-suffering Jerry Hall.

The author Robert Harris, whos made millions from his novels (and films of the books Enigma, Archangel and The Ghost) says the true currency of life is time, not money: Working 14 hours a day until youre 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.

I think we all know that, Robert. Its just that those of us who are not multi-millionaires tend to have less choice in the matter.

Imran Khan, whos just published his autobiography, says passion trumps talent, and hes so right. As a cricket captain I always used to pick the most talented players.

But then I realised that people who had passion could always propel themselves to even greater heights, he says. Or as lightbulb inventor Thomas Edison put it a century before Imran: Genius is one per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration.

Mike was offside

Most women I know dont have a problem with rugby players getting drunk and behaving rowdily.

And if all newly married Mike Tindall had done was bury his boozy bald head into an attractive womans cleavage before stumbling back alone to his hotel room, no one would have given it a second thought. But eye-witness accounts claim the couple were kissing and Tindall clearly had one thing on his mind.

If he cant see whats! wrong w ith that, then perhaps he shouldnt be married. And if Martin Johnson cant see it either, perhaps he shouldnt be England manager.

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