So when’s the best age to have a baby?

Maybe we should go back to having them in our teens…

Professor Geeta Nargund, a consultant gynaecologist has said that girls should think about how delaying having babies until their late thirties would affect their chances of getting pregnant.

Fair enough.

But it’s tricky. Our grandmothers mostly had their babies in their late teens and early twenties – before the invention of GCSEs, A levels, gap years, degrees, student debt, trying to start a career and get a mortgage that requires two salaries.

Life has changed. Biology hasn’t kept up. Time for a re-think.

It always seems a desperate challenge to stop teenagers thinking of sex and concentrate on schoolwork instead. Maybe we should just let them get on with it. Have their babies and then carry on with their studies when the babies go to school. By which time they’d be so desperate to get out of the house and use their brains that they can knock off a degree in two years and not much partying because they’ve got to get home for the babysitter.

There’s the small matter of who’s going to support them, of course. Maybe the boys should take time out too and get jobs. Facing up to their responsibilities – it could make men of them instead of allow them to enjoy an extended adolescence until their 30s.

It won’t work, of course. Those days have gone. But maybe Prof Nargund should be getting the chaps thinking too.

School friends of mine had babies at 16 and were deep in the nappy bucket and mashed banana when I was enjoying student life. Then I had babies in my 30s – just when they went back to college and enjoyed themselves. By the time we got to 50 it had all evened out – except they, inevitably, will enjoy many more years with their grandchildren too.

There is no perfect time for motherhood.

But Professor Nargund does well to remind us that just because we can choose when NOT to have babies, that we can’t necessarily choose when we CAN.

SO, MPs are probably going to get a ten per cent pay rise. Not bad, eh?

They say they are unable to refuse it because the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has recommended it. Oh dear.

Their pay will go up from £67,000 to £74,000

And yes, I’m quite sure that most of them are worth it and more.

But so are the rest of us. And as we’re not going to get a ten per cent pay rise – or even any sort of pay rise – it seems foolish, if not downright arrogant, for the MPs to accept theirs.

All in it together? Fat chance.

MOTHERS of children at a London school run by a strict Jewish sect have been banned from driving their children to school. It is, apparently, “immodest” behaviour. If they insist on this elementary freedom, their children will be excluded from school.

Just to remind you. This is Britain. It is the 21st Century. Hard to believe, sometimes.

JUST when another report says what dreadful damage wearing heels does to our feet and legs and knees and hips, Barbie has gone into flatties. After a lifetime tottering along, she’s gone all sensible and down to earth.

But if you really want to get little girls thinking flats are fine, then you need to get Victoria Beckham into Birkenstocks. Good luck with that.

LAST week’s food problem – there’s always a new one every week – was bacteria in chickens. Hardly surprising when we eat nearly 1,300 million chickens a year – 400 million of them imported., many of them tasteless.

A good chicken needs not much more than a bit of salt and a lemon up its bum. But many of those aren’t good chickens. Which is why supermarkets have shelves of sauces to make them interesting.

If chicken actually tasted of chicken then you wouldn’t need a jar of gloop to make it taste of something else.

WHAT have they done to Riders? Jilly Cooper’s joyous bonk buster – rich people, lots of sex, set in Rutshire, totally OTT and great fun – has been re-issued with a toned down cover.

Instead of the the jodhpurs hugging a bum so generous it would do Kim Kardashian proud, with a man’s hand cupping the curve quite shamelessly, there’s a meaner bum and a tentative hand almost at waist level.

And it somehow seems worse – not like a jolly cartoon version of life but sort of more real and almost sleazy. Not nice.

Forget correctness – bring back the curves! And that hand…

DEPRESSING news for those of us still working in the foothills of old age and looking forward to our time in the sunlit uplands when we can wear slippers, watch TV all day and bag the soft centres.

Easton Roy has just become Scotland’s oldest rugby player, turning out for a charity match at the age of 92. Meanwhile, over in California, Harriete Thompson has just completed the San Diego marathon in seven hours 24 minutes – also at the age of 92.

Have these people no shame? It’s wonderful and all that – but it’s setting an awful high standard for the rest of us.

The Northern Echo: Lorraine Kelly in bikini

LORRAINE Kelly, 55, has posed for the camera in a bikini, because after losing weight, she finally can.

Jolly good. Well done. Now just go and get dressed please.

LEVIS are apparently investing in a new smart technology woven into the material of your jeans. This will then link up with your smartphone and tell you if you’ve put on weight.

Why?

If you can’t do the button up, there’s a clue. And you don’t even need to look at your phone.

FELICITY Kendal has given up on the Botox and is ageing naturally.

And it says something not altogether healthy about our society that a 68-year-old woman is in the news for, well, looking 68.

BACKCHAT

Dear Sharon

We had a neighbour who planted the edge of his flower beds with carrots. The foliage made a beautiful green small hedge and he had the joy of pulling a few carrots here and there for lunch.

Joyce Aspey, Brandon

Dear Sharon

While I was working down south last year, my debit card was damaged and wouldn’t work. As soon as I realised this, I went into the bank and withdrew £500 in cash. Job done, I thought. Until I went to collect a hire car. They had no facility for accepting payment in cash. My £20 notes meant nothing to them and the young assistant seemed shocked at the idea. Hard cash is already a thing of the past.

Pete Armstrong (by email)