SIXTY is the new sexy. Well, according to Cilla Black it is. She's 60 this week, looking good, feeling fine and determined to enjoy life. Instead of longing for her slippers and her bus pass she's dithering between treating herself to a Ferrari or a perfect pink diamond. And will probably get both.

Which is good news for the rest of us.

Not that we're ever likely to have to make such choices.

But the reassuring thing about Cilla is that she has had a rotten few years. Money was never a guarantee of happiness. Bobby, her husband for 30 years, died. And then Cilla decided to give up her main job, Blind Date, because it was making her ill.

Now, it might be on a humbler scale, but many women approach 60 both widowed and out of work and wonder if there's much point in going on. Cilla clearly says there is.

When Bobby died, Cilla was racked with grief, for two years she was lost, and she says she often spent 24 hours at a time in bed crying.

She lost weight and re-invented herself as this slinky, sexy creature. And at first, we could tell it was forced, an effort. But now...

Now she has grown into her freedom, seems to see it as a bonus. She's left Blind Date ("I was stressed out. It was making me miserable.") launched a CD of her greatest hits, is writing her autobiography and plans to open a nightclub - a dream she's long had.

She's not actively looking for a man in her life - Bobby was a clearly an impossible act to follow - but is warily open to the possibility.

Throughout history, women's main job has been to care for their children, their husbands, their homes. And when the husband dies and the children grow up, women have been virtually redundant, their lives have been effectively over - except maybe to look after the grandchildren.

But - given a better chance of good health and a long life - women now have a wodge of time of their own, in which they can finally find out what they want to be when they grow up. And Cilla, for one, is now determined to make the most of it.

Sixty may or may not be sexy - but it could certainly be the beginning of some bonus years for all of us.

DON'T cry for cry baby Jemini and their nul points.

If you're not going to win, (and do you really think it deserved to?) how much better to do spectacularly badly. In years to come, who will remember who came second, third or seventh in the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest?

But Jemini are guaranteed fame for at least the next 20 years - if only as a quiz question.

THEY are digging up Middleton Tyas.

On every bend, round every corner there are humps, bumps, traffic lights, bollards - anything to make getting out even more difficult than it is already. There are new signs, white lines and a traffic island carefully positioned to cause maximum chaos.

The idea - laudable enough - is to slow down speeding drivers, principally for the safety of the children at the school.

But a recent survey showed that most of the motorists speeding through the village were mothers on the school run.

Speed-activated warning lights would do a simpler, neater, more effective job. As they would in many other villages facing this same manic urbanisation.

It's bad enough now, in good weather and daylight. What will it be like in the dark in winter when the village hill is a mile-long sheet of snow and ice, often blocked by stranded cars?

I hope I'm wrong, but since these "improvements" I fear there are just more accidents waiting to happen.

CONGRATULATIONS to Stephen Pattinson and Denise Spooner of Richardsons Florists in Barnard Castle, who have just won a bronze award with their display at the Chelsea Flower Show.

The display, on the theme of Madame Butterfly, was dedicated to memory of Steve's wife, Stephanie, a lovely lady who was a regular at Chelsea, won lots of medals and who died of cancer 18 months ago

The Chelsea visit was a way of publicising the Holistic Cancer Care project at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough.

So well done to Steve and Denis, Stephanie would be proud of them - and now they've got a bronze, I bet they'll be back next year, going for gold.

PS: A SCHOOL in Manchester is sending teachers on patrol to make sure that pupils get up in time for their exams.

Surely, part of the point of doing exams is having the discipline to get yourself there to sit them?

Like one of Smaller Son's friends who set out to catch a bus to school six miles away in time for a GCSE exam. The bus didn't come.

Both his parents were at work forty miles away and he didn't have money for a taxi.

So, determined and desperate, he walked up to the services at Scotch Corner and practically hi-jacked a car and driver to get him to school in the nick of time.

Definitely worth a pass.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/griffiths.html