I’m guessing here, but few of us actively want to be old or fat. I don’t, that’s why I have remained the same weight since puberty, and am sitting writing this piece over a bowl of butternut and chilli squash soup, wearing a grey sweatshirt, combats, Converse trainers and a keffiyeh wound around my neck for warmth, as if I am not over 40 – as if, ha ha – but still at university.

Ooops! Did I just say neck? I should never have mentioned my neck. As we all know, it’s the neck and hands that give us away – and reveal that middle-aged women are fighting a losing, expensive, boring and ultimately life-destroying battle to pretend we are, on average, a decade younger than we are – or in the case of Nancy Dell’Olio two decades younger.

Dell’Olio looks 50 to me, but swears her biological age is 26. “I have it checked regularly,” she says, as we (forever forties, disco dads, 50-is-the-new-30 suckers, all) gurgle in unison with pleasure at poor old Nancy’s tragic lack of self-awareness.

And mature women in particular don’t want to be old or fat. In fact we want people to tell us how slim and great we look, preferably all the time. Our husbands are longing for us to live a little, our children don’t care what we look like, plus everyone knows that women past a certain age look stringy and scraggy if they don’t eat apple crumble, but we don’t care.

We don’t want to stop wearing the skinny jeans, the pencil skirts, and move into the smocky world of DH Evans and the elasticated waist; we won’t allow middle-aged spread into our lives, and when it comes to it, we don’t want to become the storybook grandma with grey hair in a wispy bun, dirndl skirt and pillowy bosom either.

Given this reluctance to yield to gravity and time it is therefore no surprise to me that the story the British Dietetic Association chose to highlight eating disorders awareness week was one about how anorexia is increasingly hitting older age groups. Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, said: “There is a new pressure on women to stay young. Previously people simply grew old gracefully. Today people do anything they can to stave off getting old.”

And Beat, the eating disorders charity, said the very public existence of “older role models” such as Sharon Stone, Madonna, Jane Fonda and Carla Bruni (I am determined to work her in) were putting extra pressures on women d’un certain age, leading to a rise in eating disorders.

I can’t agree. I don’t think it’s the fault of older role models any more than I think it’s the fault of men. I think the only ones we can blame are ourselves. The only reason that women’s magazines, month after month, year after year, try to persuade us – using these genetic freaks as models – that we can all stay young and thin, against compelling evidence to the contrary, is because this is clearly what we want to hear.

“Giving your age away? 42 stay younger solutions!” promises Good Housekeeping, with actress Amanda Redman – “Fearless and facing 50” on the cover.

Meanwhile Woman & Home offers us “Look-younger treatments” (with Kylie on the cover). Over at Red a full-lipped, dewy-skinned Patsy Kensit is plugging “The smart woman’s guide to younger-looking skin.” Essentials blares “More energy! Look younger!” and Eve announces “New season, new you”, as if it’s not good enough being thin and young looking, we also have to reinvent and update our look every three months. And lastly She has Uma Thurman and an exclusive preview of something called “The 10 years younger diet”.

And over on the men’s shelves? Nothing about being young at all, but lots on carving out a solid six pack, how to lose your beer gut and how to “attack-proof” your heart. They don’t buy any of the other rubbish, you see – because men know that time waits for no one and they are much keener on having a life than pretending it’s not already half over.

So what we have here is evidence, I’m afraid, that it is women who are imposing the ordinance that women are not allowed to get old and fat on themselves, buying into it, just as women decided that mummies had to be yummy, which reminds me: it’s Mothering Sunday.

On this special day I think we should all make a particular fuss of our orthorexic, starved-looking, overexercising female friends, and warn them that they’re turning into Milfs – no, no, not that, sadly. It stands for Mothers I’d Like to Feed – not you know what.

It’s always depressing to see a thoughtful, humane politician pick up the wrong end of the stick, run with it, then pass it on, relay-style, to the team captain, and this is what seems to have happened with the Tories’ new policy on newborns.

In case you’d forgotten, Michael Gove, the shadow secretary for children, took a trip to the Netherlands and admired the “kraamzorg” system (me neither) and then David Cameron duly announced last month that a Conservative government would offer mothers six hours a day free help from maternity nurses, to include light cleaning, help with bathing and breast-feeding, and being on duty so “mum” could nap.

It goes without saying that one is weepily grateful for any hands-on help after giving birth (I would have built a Taj Mahal for anyone willing to pitch in for 20 minutes so I could change out of a soiled nightie). But the point is, surely, that not only are most able-bodied mothers programmed to care for their babies themselves, but they also have the time (maternity leave), the yearning (mother love is the strongest force of nature there is) and the equipment (breasts) to do so.

It is a daft idea to make the rest of us pay for universal services that only the wealthy can afford and even the wealthy often find surplus to requirements. And it is doubly daft to even think about throwing money at the nubile and infants rather than the old and the dying.

As Marie Curie Cancer Care reminds us in its Delivering Choice campaign, fronted by Hugh Grant and a daffodil (the actor’s mother died from pancreatic cancer and was tenderly cared for at home by the charity’s nurses, not NHS staff), most people want to be cared for at home when they are terminally ill – preferably with a suave Hugh Grant around to make cheery quips – but all too often they die in hospital instead. The statutory provision available for those who want to die in their own beds is patchy at best.

Nothing is too good for babies, they’re adorable, smell delicious and politicians kiss them, but when it comes to those who’ve paid their taxes and who are dying, old and in pain, the oft promised nursing care isn’t there. More than 64% of us want to die at home. Only 25% of us do in the end. This is terribly sad. It’s not in our first days that we need the nanny state, but in our last.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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