Paper Monitor
10:35 UK time, Wednesday, 30 April 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Oh no. It's started and it's just as awful as Paper Monitor feared. With the release of the long-awaited Sex and the City movie later this year, the inevitable features about women who are still "naughty-at-40" have started to pop up in the newspapers.
The Daily Telegraph gets the ball rolling with a piece on how "hanging out with people half her age bought a new lease of life to one middle-aged rebel". Unfortunately for the author of the piece, Clair Woodward, reading about her "naughtysomething, not fortysomething" existence is the newspaper equivalent of bumping into your nan at a nightclub - completely cringeworthy.
In the last week she says she's "been to a birthday party in a saucy scarlet wig" and "learnt rude words in sign language over drinks down the pub". Her advice for becoming a "naughtysomething" is "getting a daft wig, some red suede shoes and friends who only laugh at you when you're in the pub after work, telling them jokes".
As she says, fortysomething women can't all be at home "grooming the cat and drinking Ovaltine" - because that's what usually happens when they reach the big 40 - right? But her look-how-crazy-I-am article just ends up veering between desperation and complete comedy - and unlike those friends she mentions above Paper Monitor is laughing at her, definitely not with her.
Good for you Ms Woodward if you want to wear a stupid wig, just don't try and sell it as a sign of eternal youth to the rest of us. The good news for her is that she doesn't give two hoots about what other people think. She says she'd just "blow a raspberry" in your face if you called her childish. Can you wear the wig while you're doing it? Pretty please.
The 
