IT'S THE YEAR OF THE WRINKLIE

I really love the way the new year flushes out people who are willing to lay their heads on the block and make predictions about the future. According to this, Camilla is the new It-Girl, oh yes, Camilla Parker-Bowles, the big boned galumphing aristocrat with really bad posture, the surrogate tampon who took on a beautiful princess and snatched away a jug-eared simpleton. Seems this is what we all aspire to now, according to Marian Salzman of J Walter Thompson we all want to be a woman who has no achievements to her credit but a little light charity work and her ability to ensnare a prominent man.

On the other hand, as a woman of a certain age, I’m thrilled to bits that the people who decide these things have determined the wrinklie is IN. “Young women are so over,” says Salzman, opening up a lucrative market niche, older people with presumably fat checkbooks, falling in love, getting married and desperately needing all the products that go with it, since Camilla and Charles have de-stigmatised love over the age of 50. Even now, Nokia is working on cellphones for the older generation that do nothing but “make calls and if you’re feeling very adventurous, texting.” I am so glad about that, far too many buttons on the dang thing. According to the oracles, “affluent women in their forties and fifties are returning to the way they ate as children”. Hmm, jelly and fish fingers are so not in my freezer.

Other predictions include a new medievalism (and you only have to drive around Sandhurst to see that palisade fencing has become our national tree) and apparently growing our own food will become the “big aspiration thing”. I’m not sure how you grow cannelloni, but I think Woolies does it better, ditto for the prediction that we are going to find a new respect for our livers with “alcohol-free entertaining” (in which universe).

I’m all for the “new-connoisseurship”, a “sipping and savouring”, but I don’t even know what a chastity ring is and I don’t like the sound of “new Puritanism” or anything about “buttoned-up sexual restraint”, which jars oddly with Camilla’s new found sexiness about which Salzman says “she has an earthy, restrained sexiness that makes her bizarrely desirable.”

Oh and we’re going to start loving our neighbours, yeah right, good fences and all.