WHEN you get to my age, you’re lucky if you still have your mum ¬ ¬- and I’m well aware that I'm very fortunate indeed.

My mum is still going strong despite being in her 80s, and I love her to bits. She’s always been there when I’ve needed her, always given me support in everything I’ve done, and always made me feel better about myself.

She’s a great mum – but I’m sorry to say she isn’t perfect. Every now and then, she gets on my nerves because she still treats me like I’m a three-year-old.

You see, the annoying thing about mums is that they can’t help giving health advice. They know more than all the doctors and nurses in the world.

I’m 53 in a couple of weeks but my mum still can’t resist telling me to “have a hot toddy” – whisky in hot water, with honey and lemon – every time she detects a sniffle.

“That’ll do you a lot more good than any of that paracetamol,” she says.

And, as soon as there’s the slightest chill in the air, she’s forever telling me to “wrap up warm”.

“You need to get a scarf on,” she tells me. “Where’s your coat? Haven’t you got any gloves? Is that the thickest jumper you’ve got? You’ll catch your death.” It does my head in.

Over the past few years, I’ve been having lots of trouble with my knees, to the extent that I’ve needed three operations, but my mum seems to know a lot more than the surgeon.

“Now, listen to me, you need to rub some olive oil into your knees,” she announced. “I do it every morning and I’ve never had any trouble with my knees.”

She even gave me a small bottle of olive oil in wrapping paper for my birthday and told me to keep it next to my bed.

In the end, just to get a bit of peace and quiet, I had to tell her that I’d started giving my knees a regular olive oil rub and it had worked wonders.

There’s more. Over Christmas, I picked up a nasty chest infection and it dragged on for weeks. In fact, I still haven’t quite got rid of it and I made the big mistake of coughing when I phoned my Mum at the weekend.

“Have you still got that cough?” she said.

“Yes, just a little bit,” I replied.

And then came her most bizarre piece of health advice thus far: “You need to stop drinking so much tea – it fermentates your pipes,” she declared.

Just in case you’re tempted to cut back on the amount of tea you drink, I’ve checked all the medical websites and I can’t find any reference to pipe fermentation caused by overdosing on PG Tips.

THE THINGS THEY SAY

MANY thanks to Henry McLaren who wrote to me from Brancepeth, Durham, with a lovely little tale about his grand-daughter.

It was a wet Saturday afternoon and Henry had taken the little girl to an indoor play centre, where one of the main attractions was a climbing wall. The climbers had to be fastened into a safety harness by an attendant.

A queue had formed but, eventually, his grand-daughter reached the front and waited excitedly.

“Come ‘ere” the attendant shouted over.

Mia’s eyes widened and her jaw nearly hit the floor as she gasped: “How did you know my name?”

MY old friend Noel Lord, once a photographer at The Northern Echo, has been in touch with a tale from his son’s fiancée Kelly, who is a teacher.

The class next door to Kellly’s has a fish tank and her kids sometimes pop in to take a look.

One little boy ran back into Kelly’s class to ask why a fish was floating on its side.

“He’s probably just feeling a bit poorly,” explained Kelly, diplomatically.

To which the boy replied: “If he’s feeling poorly, why did he come to school?”

THE THINGS THEY DO

OUR sports editor Nick Loughlin told me how his daughter Hannah, aged eight, had been told off by Auntie Kathleen for being a bit cheeky when she and brother Thomas were visiting after school.

Hannah didn’t take the telling off very well at all ¬ ¬and stormed out of the kitchen towards the lounge.

There’s a table in the lounge with 40 or so family photographs in a variety of frames.

Later that night, after the kids had gone home, it was discovered that someone had turned every photo of Auntie Kathleen round to face the wall.