AS obituaries go, Princess Margaret's have been pretty mixed. Well, to be right, some of them have been downright hostile. Whatever happened to not speaking ill of the dead, eh?

The princess clearly had her problems and her faults in pretty generous measure. She was not an easy woman.

And yet, despite her rackety life, her tempestuous marriage, her toy boy and other lovers, she and the equally rackety Lord Snowdon managed to raise two children who seem happy, easy-going, hard working and anxious to get on with their lives in pretty normal fashion, certainly in comparison with the rest of the royals.

Their son, Viscount Linley was on Desert Island Discs recently and was rabbiting on quite cheerfully about his childhood - about making things with his father, going on outings with his mother. It was, he said, a happy, interesting childhood. Despite the rows, the affairs, the divorce and the publicity, they managed to do a decent job of raising their children.

If nothing else, Princess Margaret seemed to have had a talent for motherhood. Only days before her death she attended her grandson's birthday party and returned home, apparently with a helium balloon tied to her wheelchair.

In all the acres of photographs we've seen in the last few days that's the image that perhaps could have told us most of all about the Princess.

COINCIDENCE No.1: Meet up with an old friend in London and discover that our younger sons - who haven't seen each other for years - are planning to do the same subject at the same university and also both plan to spend part of their summer in Outer Mongolia. The way you do.

Coincidence No. 2: Feeling maternal and mellow (the Australian Shiraz in the wine lounge at Waterstones in Piccadilly might just have had something to do with it), we scour the enormous travel section for books on Mongolia, but to no avail. Then another customer interrupts "Are you looking for books on Mongolia?" she asks, "Because I've just written one."

Unless she haunts the travel section of Waterstones, touting for potential customers, the odds on that must be zillions to one.

Anyway, just in case Mongolia is the destination of the year and your little boy is going there too, the book is called The Wild East:Travels in the New Mongolia by Jill Lawless and is published next month by Summersdale.

Don't tell me - you bumped into her in Waterstones too.

SO what do you know about nouns and verbs and tenses and first, second and third persons?

If you know anything, the chances are that you're over 40 and went to school when grammar was a solid part of the curriculum. When we went to on to learn other languages we had some good building blocks with which to do so.

Now over 14s are going to be able to drop learning a foreign language and primary children are going to start.

Before we start on foreign languages, it might be an idea if we stopped being baffled by our own. It's not only illegal immigrants who would fail an English test.

IT'S alright for me. I just made it under the wire as one of the last women who will be able to retire at 60.Whether I will be able to afford to do so, is of course a completely different matter.

Which is why a Government think tank is now saying that retirement should be postponed until we are all, men and women, at least 67.

Well, it makes sense - especially if they're going to carry on pushing teenagers off to university.

It's not much more than a generation ago that most people started work at 15. By the time they retired at 65,they'd done 50 years in work, hard work too.

Now most people won't start until they're 21. Even if they work until they're 67, they're still knocking off four years earlier than their grandads and probably have a lot more years left to live and enjoy.

But if you want to retire early, you'd better start saving - ideally starting with your first birthday money.

EVEN top models are entitled to their privacy and surely Naomi Campbell was entitled to sort out her drug problem in private, without tabloid newspapers telling the world. The irony is, of course, is that to defend her privacy, she now has to go to court and have all the details relayed in public in even greater detail to fill even more newspaper space.

She will soon have no secrets left to guard - but if she wins, at least others might eventually benefit.

CONGRATULATIONS to Tanni Grey-Thompson and husband Ian on the birth of baby Carys.

Although they live in Redcar, Carys was born in Cardiff as Tanni was determined that her baby was going to be born in Wales. Excellent.

As a poster on my wall says "To be born Welsh is to be born privileged, not with a silver spoon in your mouth but music in your blood and poetry in your soul."

Just don't mention the rugby.

Published: 13.02.02