Apparently, women living 50 years ago were far fitter than the fairer sex is today, or so a piece of research tells us.

A suburban lady's chores in the 1950s were a far more effective way of burning lard than ours are. An average of 1,512 calories a day was used up by shopping, cooking and cleaning, and that's excluding the acrobatic feats accomplished in their tidy bedrooms to satisfy the lusts of the 1950s' husband.

Research has found that the paltry 556 calories a day a modern-day woman burns off is not conducive to a healthy lifestyle and despite rigorous gym workouts and a culture of dieting, she is on her way to becoming a great big buffalo of the wilds.

The study makes me feel as if I am living alongside a breed of fat old lags who munch their way through a mound of cheeseburgers before going back to slump in their unkempt houses. I may well be larger than the pointy-breasted Stepford wives of yesteryear, but at least I don't have to take half a bottle of Valium before switching on the Hoover.

I don't need to hang out inside an immaculate house in fluffy slippers with matching gown, wondering what I will do after I have given the oven a good hard scrubbing and flirted with the milkman. I've got an appetite for bigger things (quite literally).

I have more meaningful duties in my life than de-frosting the fridge and whacking a decade of dust out of a rug, such as discussing men (the disappointing bastards), life (just can't understand it) and the future (lovely husband who will do all the cooking and housework), over a nice cup of tea and a big sticky bun. There is no way in hell I am getting rid of the tumble dryer and installing myself a nice rusty wringer in order to drop a dress size.

Why are modern women always getting picked on for not doing enough? We endure daily humiliations at the gym, we starve ourselves until we get eating disorders, we are ready to go under the surgeon's knife to defy ageing and now they're telling us we've got to dispense with high-tech appliances and get horny knuckled with too much hand-washing.

Victorian ladies had three-day laundry sessions and women in South India working on rice plantations probably lose 5,000 calories an hour being half liquified by the scorching hot sun. Does that mean it is a better, more healthy lifestyle to adopt?

Shouldn't the meaning of 'good health' be a little more holistic than the sum of how many calories we use in the day, no matter how happy or miserable we are?

Another ludicrous study has said children are having their development stifled by "intolerant adults" who are stopping them from playing outdoors.

But how can parents be "tolerant" if they let their eight-year-old wander outdoors and happily forget about good, active parenting? I personally think playing outdoors is over-rated.

As a pre-teenage tearaway, I would go nicking penny sweets and dropping water-bombs on frail old ladies. I would tear through supermarkets knocking down baked bean tins and then I learned that wrapping toilet paper around posh people's garden shrubs could be just as entertaining.

My "tolerant" parents thought I was playing hopscotch but I had got bored with that years ago.