DOCTOR’S NOTE
But his battle for his life has dominated Lynda’s for the past year – he’s been in and our of surgery for a punctured lung after swallowing pampas grass.
“I cannot believe this dog has created so much emotion in me, so many tears, so many prayers. All the dogs I’ve had in my life, nothing compares to this one creature – he’s so gentle, and so loving,” she says. “And now he’s eating like a starving donkey... but he’s back!”
So what does it take to look as fabulous as Lynda at 79 (apart from dog walks and green beans)?
“I bang on a bit of Nivea or whatever,” she says, when asked if she has a strict skincare regime – and she hasn’t been to a hairdresser in 20-30 years. “My sister cuts my hair,” she laughs, holding her enviably thick tresses. “She lobbed off four inches. I said, ‘I just wanted a trim, what have you done?”’
Lynda even does her own highlights: “You know when you see them with the tin foil? I thought, ‘I can do that!’ So I went to Sainsbury’s, bought the foil, bought the peroxide, mixed it up. I did about two with tin foil and thought, ‘Oh, this is very boring’, so I got the toothbrush.
“So I have very, very minor beauty aids of any description. You could pump me full of Botox and I still have a little wizened face, so what is the point?” she jokes.
“The only thing that I occasionally have is a wonderful massage.”
Vanished by Lynda La Plante is published by Zaffre, £18.99 in hardback.
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The number of women getting pregnant in England and Wales has fallen for the fifth year in a row, figures show.
Women are increasingly likely to conceive at an older age, while pregnancies among under-18s have plummeted by 17% in a year, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Experts suggested the coronavirus restrictions played a role, with younger women less likely to have been co-habiting. Overall, there were 817,515 conceptions in 2020 to women aged 15 to 44, down very slightly from 821,089 conceptions in 2019.
Conceptions among younger women continued to fall, but rose among women aged over 30, hitting a record high for those between 30 and 34.