The joy of menopause: I’ve turned into Superwoman!

NEWS trickled into my poor deaf ears last week that Kirsty Wark has made a documentary about her experience of going through… hmm, what, I wonder, is worthy of a BBC film made at our expense? Let’s have a think. Going through the murky waters of the Med from Syria to Greece? Going through the Time Tunnel, coming out in the land of the dinosaurs? No, no, no. She has made a film about going through… the menopause.

It was a ‘hard menopause’, apparently, involving ‘disconcerting side effects such as disturbed sleep and night sweats, waking up literally wrung out,’ the 62-year-old said last week. ‘The tumultuous nights have persisted, though to a lesser extent.’

You see, this is the problem with most feminists. They see anything involved with being in possession of two X chromosomes as necessarily A BIG PROBLEM.

Little girls are oppressed by pink stuff. Teenage girls spend too much time on social media, are judged by their looks, and are prey to old men, particularly DJs. Twentysomethings are underpaid. Thirtysomethings are overlooked if they take maternity leave. Fortysomethings deserve IVF if they put career before children. Sixtysomethings deserve TO BE PAID for looking after their parents (I found out only the other day that a retired daughter in Scotland can claim an allowance for caring for her mother).

And now fiftysomethings – Kirsty Wark should surely have made her documentary a decade ago – are making films about the fact they haven’t, you know, died, but are instead, wait for it… GROWING OLD!

But I am here to tell you, ladies, that the menopause is the best thing that will ever happen to you. A decade ago, I experienced symptoms that meant I was premenopausal. Worried, I went to my gynaecologist on Harley Street. She took a blood test, and a few weeks later I went back for the results.

‘The good news,’ she said, ‘is that you still have oestrogen, at least for a couple more years. Enjoy your hormones!’

The problem is, I had never enjoyed my hormones. God, who would? The angst of wondering whether a boy has noticed you; the terror of a party; a snog; the putting on of a bikini. Worst of all, female hormones mean you put up with men who spout nonsense and unfulfilled promises, who are boring and insolvent and unfaithful. Female hormones mean you are eager to please, nurturing, generous, tolerant, subservient, and doomed to disappointment.

Now that the hormones have disappeared (along with the fat in my buttocks), now that I’m a brittle-boned husk with all the emotion of Siri, I’ve discovered an inner cantankerousness that knows no bounds.

With no ‘caring’ hormones coursing through my veins, I talk to tradesmen, shopkeepers, plumbers and policemen with the intonation of Barbara Woodhouse on a really bad day. It really gets results: they don’t just sit, they roll over.

I’m invisible, too, and have found this not a drawback but a superpower. Who on earth wants to be called ‘love’ by a man who weighs 20st and is wearing a vest, or to have to wait by the phone for decades for Him to call? Who wants heat coursing through their veins when you discover a text on his phone from another woman, when you can have ice instead?

To be post-menopausal is to be truly liberated: from nonsense, from being in a contest you never wanted to enter in the first place.

WHEN pop star Rihanna posts online that ‘Liz Jones is a menopausal mess’, or a younger female rival writes that my first name should really be ‘Nana’, I punch the air, because if the only thing a younger woman can accuse you of is not having died, they are displaying only their own lack of imagination.

They are jealous they’re still in the race, while you are past the finishing post, not even having broken a sweat (we PMW no longer perspire; the saving in Dove products is enormous!).

It’s a shame men don’t go through the menopause. Instead they shuffle on, wrinkled and ridiculous. PMW are powerful: just look at Angela Merkel and Theresa May. They’re not sexting. They’re ruling the world.