THERE is something quite distracting about sharing a changing room with a gaggle of naked old ladies.

I find communal changing rooms difficult at the best of times, as anyone who has read this column for any length of time will know, But when the changing room is filled with jolly senior citizens and their jolly bits and bobs, I now know from bitter experience that I can barely function.

My mum invited me to her health spa - she doesn't own it, she just acts like she does - for a post-Christmas day by the pool with her sister, her mate and numerous grey-haired chums she has made in the aqua-aerobics club.

I had mentally prepared myself for being the youngest there by a Yorkshire mile - something of a rarity these days as I rapidly approach decrepitude - but I had not prepared myself for how relaxed and carefree older women tend to be.

While us thirty-something whippersnappers constantly worry what other people might think about our creeping cellulite, our south-seeking boobs, our rampant body hair and our bottom dimples, sixty, seventy and eighty-somethings don't seem to give a hoot.

I don't mind admitting that I scuttled into a private changing cubicle before you could say "bodged bikini line" (honestly, it looked like my nether regions had just joined the Marines), but I was the only one. The older members of the group were happy to change cheek-to-cheek in the communal bit.

There were more wrinkles on display than on the Shar-Pei stand at Crufts, but no one seemed remotely bothered. Women were marching about in the nude, drying their hair in the nude, applying their make-up in the nude and chatting about everything under the sun - and under several very full moons - in the nude.

This liberated attitude extended beyond the changing rooms too. There was no nudity poolside - although some of the cossies left little to the imagination - but there was an overriding attitude of oh, what the hell; let it all hang out if you want to'.

There were numerous incredibly relaxed women in the whirlpool, bubbling away like a tank of grey-haired lobsters, more stacked three-high in the sauna, another batch in the steam room, complete with row-upon-row of steamed up glasses, and yet more zooming up and down the pool like a school of dolphins where the average leaving age is 77.

Everyone was just having fun, and if that involved the odd wobble here and the even odder wibble there, then so be it.

This is obviously not a world-shattering revelation to anyone already drawing their pension, but it is an unfamiliar concept to us more self-conscious youngsters (look at me, calling myself a youngster like I'm still wearing party frocks and pigtails).

I'm not saying I'm ready to hang up my hair-dye and join the blue rinse brigade just yet. But after a day in their company, it's not such a scary prospect.

I'm just not sure I've got the energy to keep up.


I'VE managed to just about ignore the January sales this year. I usually go berserk, running up and down Coney Street waving my credit cards above my head shouting "come and get 'em", but this year I've been quite sedate.

I haven't queued up from 5am to buy a pair of slashed knickers from Next (I mean slashed in price - get your minds out of the gutter people) and I haven't mown down small children in my fevered desire to bag a bargain bag in Browns.

In fact, I have only ventured into one shop. I thought I had hit on the sale of the century until I got home and realised I had bought my daughter a swimsuit with a hole in the gusset and my son a girl's coat.

I haven't been back since. I think it's safer that way.