Trust me Madge, you’ll NEVER find true love with a toy boy

THE best advice anyone has ever given me was when I was in a restaurant in Paris with my (female) boss, talking about my then 26-yearold boyfriend. ‘ Anything over a ten-year gap won’t work,’ she said. The yawning chasm between me and my future husband was 15 years, though I was already lying to him, saying it was only nine.

‘That’s not necessarily true,’ I told her. ‘I’m well preserved. I buy expensive skincare in Space. NK. I do Pilates.’

‘Won’t make a blind bit of difference,’ she said. ‘You might lie, but numbers never do.’

Let’s examine some numbers, shall we? Madonna’s new toy boy, Timor Steffens, is 32 years her junior. Mariah Carey’s beau is 16 years younger than her. And Wendi Deng is with a man 26 years younger than she is.

Cheryl is having a baby with a toddler – One Direction’s Liam – who is ten years her junior. My God, toy boys are even a current storyline on EastEnders, where Michelle Fowler has revealed she is dating one of her pupils.

So let me offer some advice to these high-profile hotties who nonetheless remember a time before Pokemon, Netflix, and all-you-can-eat porn.

You might think the fact a younger man finds you attractive is somehow empowering, an ego boost. It’s not. It is a rollercoaster ride, bumping over a minefield of acne (his) and liver spots (yours). Let me count not just the years between me and my man, but the ways he humiliated me.

Out and about, I was always in head-to-toe Prada and heels, while he was in his giant toddler uniform of outsize lowslung track pants, trainers and baseball cap. People assumed I was his care-in-thecommunity worker.

There’s worse. I once sent him to collect laundry from a dry cleaner’s. Actually, that’s another problem with younger men: the constant need to give them detailed instructions, with important things underlined and diagrams, to get them to do anything practical. They have all been raised by disappointed women whose husbands divorced them long ago, meaning the younger man not only has never changed a duvet cover, he is blissfully unaware of its very existence.

Anyway, he returned with the laundry, still chuckling. I asked: ‘Why are you laughing?’ He replied: ‘The man in the dry cleaner’s said, “It’s OK, Mummy has already paid for it.”’ (Yes, that’s another problem with younger men. The older woman always, always pays.)

I have no idea whether Liam is constantly firing off ageist insults in Cheryl’s direction, but my husband was always aiming poisonous darts at my fastresembling-a-melting-Viennetta behind. ‘Come on, old lady, come on Mummy,’ he’d say. ‘Careful you don’t break a hip.’

The jokes, like the skin beneath my eyes, wore thin.

YOU see, Dear Refurbished Madonna. Oh, and hello Heidi Klum, with a man 13 years her junior (my one claim to fame is that Heidi’s future husband, Seal, once asked me on a date). An ageing female trumps every other affliction in the known world.

Your husband might have cellulite. He might be penniless and talentless. He might be entirely useless when it comes to anything practical (and that’s another thing – younger men have no concept of DIY. When I forced my husband to stop playing football on his Xbox and mow the lawn, he returned, exhausted, slumped in a chair and exclaimed: ‘Thank God that’s over for another year!’).

He might be cruel, and humourless. But he will always, always trump you.

What ended my marriage (aside from the inevitable affairs with women who were younger, dimmer, slimmer) was the fact he wanted to start a family (‘I need to be a dad, and you can’t give me that’) and I was as long past my sell-by date as a mince pie in August.

It’s exhausting, too, dating an infant. All the subterfuge: hiding my passport on our first holiday abroad, trying to bribe the vicar when she was about to publish our banns, block-booking the Aveda salon to remove any hint of grey hair, anywhere.

I always felt I was revising for an O-level I was never going to pass (oh, how he laughed when he learned I was too far old for GCSEs!).

My husband did show one glimmer of understanding, though, in our brief, four-year shackling. Watching me slather on skin cream in bed each night, he would drum his fingers impatiently as he wanted to go to sleep to get up early for yoga.

‘It fights the signs of ageing,’ I told him sagely.

‘What, loneliness, poverty, dementia, disappointment?’

He was right, for once. It’s fear of being alone that drives us to date mere pups. But it never works.

In Space.NK, everyone will be able to hear you scream.