BABIES are not Botox. They are not designer accessories, marriage menders, real live dolls, and they're certainly not the equivalent of rejuvenating pills.

The oldest woman to become a mother, 66-year-old Romanian Adriana Iliescu - a retired university professor, so you really think she'd know better, wouldn't you? - has said that her baby Eliza Maria, a sole survivor of twins, has given her "a new lease of life".

So that's why she did it. If she just wanted a new lease of life, you'd have thought she'd have had a new hip, a decent holiday, a facelift, or even tango lessons and a toy boy. But a baby...

Women having children in their 50s and 60s are fooling themselves. If they can have children, then they seem to think they can't be old. How can you be old if you are still fertile and have the baby to prove it?

Madness. But really, a totally logical progression of our obsession with youth.

We are refusing to grow old - gracefully, disgracefully or otherwise - and are constantly pushing back the barriers. The middle-aged dress like twenty somethings, read the same books, often like the same music.

They even look like twenty somethings - well, almost. Cosmetic surgery has become so normal - and so desperate - that American college girls are given operations for their 21st birthdays.

We think if we work hard enough, exercise, use the right creams, eat the right foods, we can have eternal youth - no grey hair, wrinkles or saggy bits. Look young, think young, feel young. And a baby is the ultimate proof - even if Professor Iliescu will be 84 before her daughter's 18, a terrible burden to put on a teenager. And that's the lucky option.

I'm talking 'bout my generation - yes, the one that hoped to die before we got old. Sixty, once considered ancient, is now barely middle-aged.

But however good we look, however young we feel - and many of us still feel, at times, that we're barely out of adolescence - we cannot escape the fact that we are knocking on a bit. You can't fool Mother Nature. Youth is more than a state of mind and a pair of scarlet boots, however much IVF treatment you have.

Middle age is also a time to stop acting like a spoilt toddler. Prof Iliescu says she worked so hard in her career that she never had the chance to build a relationship and start a family but, she says, a woman has a right to give birth.

A right? A right to bring into this world a baby who stands a seriously high risk of being orphaned while still a child? Just because she wants one?

If she were more mature, she might realise that we cannot always have everything we want in this life, whatever our so called "rights" might be.

And to have a baby at the age of 66 is the ultimate in selfishness. Prof Iliescu is already growing old. Maybe it's also time she started to grow up.

SOUNDS like something out of James Bond or Batman, but apparently the Pentagon examined the possibility of creating an aphrodisiac bomb that would distract enemy troops by making them find each other sexually irresistible.

Make love, not war.

You don't think they had a practice run in the 1960s, do you?

Love and peace, man.

Don't tell your teenagers - not making your bed kills the dust mites, says new research. It's actually healthier than smoothing and tucking and tightening the sheets.

On the other hand, those of us from more Spartan upbringings fling back the bed clothes in front of wide open windows, which kills off the bugs pretty smartish.

And when the wind is howling right through the house straight from the Arctic, it nearly kills the rest of us off too.

IMELDA Staunton, nominated for a Golden Globe award, came away empty handed but not sulking. "I'm going to party because I haven't come all this way to go to sleep," she said.

Absolutely right. If you can't beat them, then party with them.

And by the end of the night, who will remember who won what?