If you are female and around retirement age you are well aware that your shape is very different from when you were younger, but generally you can forget this unwelcome fact – except when shopping for clothes.  You may start off your shopping trip feeling cheerful and positive but there’s a good chance when you’ve finished shopping and are walking back to your car all you will be carrying will be a new oven glove, a 2011 calendar of border collies ( much reduced), three pairs of tights and something for supper.  You will also be close to tears and feeling ugly because everything you tried on, however beautiful it looked on the rail, made you look either too fat, too short, too thin, too shapeless or too old… and those unforgiving lights and the cruel three-way mirrors in the changing rooms so helpfully highlighted all your worst features.

The answer I suppose is to shop on-line and confine your clothes shopping ordeal to the privacy of your own home.  Then you can sigh, groan or break down in tears in and no-one will hear.  But you could also remind yourself that even when you went clothes shopping in your twenties you still looked critically at your reflection and felt you were either too fat, too short, too thin, too shapeless or too young.  You’ve never looked perfect and like most females, have never been satisfied with your looks.  So always tell your daughters, daughters-in-law, grand-daughters, younger friends that they look wonderful: encourage them and don’t keep telling them things like “Make the most of your youth, it doesn’t last” that’s so negative and depressing and besides, they won’t listen – did you at their age?