PERHAPS prompted by the warning, in the British Medical Journal, that women who delay childbirth into their late 30s or 40s "risk heartbreak", fertility experts have identified a related matter.

More women are choosing to conceive through IVF treatment than natural sex.

A gynaecologist who practises in London and Dorset, reports that the number of women seeking "inappropriate" IVF has rocketed by 20 per cent in recent years. He says: "There is a trend towards medicalised conception."

If these women don't like sex, well that's a shame, for them and their husbands. But here's the killer line. The gynaecologist notes: "I have people who come to me for IVF who haven't got time for sex."

Haven't got time for sex, yet these women still want to have a child. How much time do they suppose a child will demand?

AN admirable body called County Watch carried out an audacious mission the other day. Highly visible in fluorescent jackets and bright yellow hard hats, members removed ten Welcome to the County of Lincolnshire roadsigns. Far from acting covertly they invited the Press, who obtained striking images of a large motorway-sized sign being carried away.

With much credibility, County Watch argues they were not breaking the law. For the signs stood up to 15 miles within the borders of Lincolnshire, on the boundary of the former administrative county of Humberside.

The group rightly draws attention not only to the scrapping of Humberside County Council in 1996 but a Government reassurance when local government was reformed in 1974: "The new county boundaries are for administrative purposes and will not alter the traditional boundaries of the counties."

County Watch has also removed "Somerset" signs which don't mark the real Somerset. Hopefully it will turn its attention to County Durham, whose southern boundary, if you believe the signs, now zig-zags back and forth across the Tees, the proper, inspiring boundary.

As County Watch says, if the true boundaries, which embody centuries, even millennia, of history, aren't firmly asserted soon the public will lose awareness of them. And for what? An unloved administrative pattern that survived intact for a mere 22 years.

RELATED business. As a satisfied customer of Middlesbrough-based furniture retailer Barker and Stonehouse I applaud the extension of their chain to Hull, where their seventh store opens next month. But less pleasing is this comment by managing director James Barker: "We have steadily expanded the business and naturally crept down into Yorkshire over recent years."

From which county has B & S "crept into" Yorkshire? When he opens that Hull store, Mr Barker might do well if he stresses that B & S arrive not as outsiders but fond relatives, from one distant, out-on-a-limb part of Yorkshire to another.

FINALLY, one of those frequent stories which, if published on April 1, would be taken as an April Fool's item. Backed by Nasa, space scientists in America are working on the concept of a space elevator - a 62,000-mile long cable from Earth, kept taut by an orbiting counter-weight at the far end, up which vehicles would travel to space stations.

That prospect might excite you. It depresses me with the thought that we are about to add wire clutter to the litter with which we already defile space.