I nominated lovely Alan Titchmarsh for inclusion in my Guilty Pleasures list

Ihave to say, I’m with the North Koreans on Alan Titchmarsh’s trousers. Censors in that intriguing dictatorship blurred out the gardener and TV presenter’s jeans in an episode of Alan Titchmarsh’s Garden Secrets, screened on Korean TV, because denim jeans are regarded as a ‘symbol of western imperialism’. Choosing — somewhat understandably — to overlook the bit about western imperialism, the Yorkshire horny-handed son of the soil responded thus: ‘It’s taken me to reach the age of 74 to be regarded in the same sort of breath as Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart.’ Not quite, Alan, but when life gives you lemons, sure knock yourself out.

Besides. There was a night, a couple of years ago, when a bunch of old friends and I sat around a West Cork dinner table for several hours discussing Titchmarsh and, more specifically, whether we’d be interested in exploring his controversial trousers, long before they became controversial. For the record, it was I who nominated the former Pebble Mill host as being worthy of inclusion in the Guilty Pleasures parade of basically unlikely and frequently crocked older men we were considering ravaging without either their knowledge or consent.

These are important conversations. It is rare enough these years that we all get to sit down together, scattered as we are between Dublin, Cork and Los Angeles, and when we do, we are obliged to eat up a lot of precious time discussing boring business like illness, bereavement, break-ups, no longer working parts, adult children with notions and how close everywhere is to a hospital. It’s only when we’ve put away these foolish things that we can get onto more serious topics, like whether Michael Portillo is more attractive than Michael Palin and how we would literally fight each other to the death for a quick go of Trevor Eve.

It was into one of these intelligent late night debates that Alan Titchmarsh’s credentials were first considered. For me, the proposer, the Yorkshire hoe-master ticked all the necessary boxes: vaguely symmetrical, twinkly, popular on daytime television.

But more importantly, when I first caught myself pausing over the remote control, he prompted that mortifying moment when you realise you have an embarrassing crush on somebody wholly unsuitable. When you’ve spent your formative years around rock’n’roll and you once had a photo of Iggy Pop in the nude on your living room wall, finding yourself mildly aroused by a Northern English man in wellingtons talking about how to control bindweed feels like every kind of wrong. It’s a bit like a Booker prize winner being caught reading a Mills and Boon on the toilet.

Anyway, as it happened, there was only one other taker for Titchmarsh that night, as the others made all the scornful you’vecompletely-lost-it-this-time responses for which I have loved them for more than 40 years. There followed a more measured debate on the Michael Palin problem — for me, Palin is too obvious, and I’m never really convinced that the majority of the gang really would, given the opportunity, explore his pole, as it were. They insist otherwise, and on it goes.

There was another night, when we sat down to plan a sailing trip around the Irish coast, on a super yacht that would be crewed by seen and not heard people while we idled the days away with our dream dates (to be absolutely clear here: I, at 57, am the youngest member of this group, the eldest of whom is in her seventies). For this particular excursion, we were allowed to choose not only a fabulous man, but you could specify what age he could be for the purposes of the trip. I don’t know how Kris Kristofferson in his 50s, Al Pacino in his 40s, Nick Cave in his 50s and Brad Pitt now (that was me, I reckoned I could increase my chances if I passed on the time travel element) would feel about sailing around the west coast of Ireland with a bunch of post-menopausal, gravity-challenged Irish women, but it may be a moot point as the discussion ended with me suggesting that the weather wouldn’t be good enough to sustain the fantasy, let alone the reality. The others disagreed, and so we settled on a departure date, a couple of weeks ahead, and agreed to check in on the date to see how the weather would have been for Brad and Nick and Kris et Al.

The day dawned and it was an absolute beauty. I messaged the others and conceded it would have been perfect for our trip. ‘What trip?’ came the replies. Which is another reason why, along with all the ones related above, I love these crazy, brilliant women.