IT is hard to believe our Government ministers were all teenagers once. Those surging hormones, all that anger and resentment. The spots, the insecurities, the desperate need to prove they were grown-up and worldly. Have they forgotten what it felt like?

Weren't they embarrassed by their parents? Didn't they consider anyone over the age of 30 as ancient, out-of-touch and frumpy?

Why, then, send the public health minister, dressed in a suit, out to front a £2m advertising campaign telling young people the Government says it's OK to be a virgin?

They may as well just dish out free condoms and tell them to get on with it.

This Government has always been desperate to appear "with-it" and cool. But its latest doomed campaign merely confirms what teenagers have been moaning about for years: grown-ups just don't understand.

INTERESTING to note that Ann Widdecombe's anti-cannabis policy "is not targeted at middle-class youths experimenting with drugs at university but at blocking the supply of drugs in rundown estates". So, as long as an experimenting youth can show police his student's card and prove his dad earns £40,000 a year that's OK then?

TV PRESENTER Anthea Turner has been telling all about her sexless first marriage and passionate affair with her husband's friend, Grant Bovey. In her autobiography, she spares none of the tawdry, intimate details, from what sort of knickers she was wearing, to how her husband broke down when he discovered her deceit. She describes the "trauma" of her honeymoon with second husband, Grant, after being criticised for being photographed eating chocolate bars, in what looked like a promotional stunt, at their wedding.

"I could not leave my room for days, my eyes were so puffy from crying,'' she says. Turner comes across as self-centred, cold and unfeeling. Clearly, she doesn't know the meaning of the word trauma. She gives no thought to the feelings of her ex-husband, Bovey's ex-wife or his children. She sold her own wedding for a six-figure sum, making guests sign confidentiality contracts. Now she is milking the story of her tacky affair. Anthea, it appears, will tell us anything for money. How much would it cost to get her to shut up?

FOLLOWING the success of her TV programme, Nigella Lawson's new book, How To Be A Domestic Goddess, is out this week. The gorgeous, raven-haired beauty seems to spend all her time in the kitchen baking beautiful, dainty fairy cakes and fresh breads, and draping exotic fruits over freshly baked meringues, in between making the children's tea, hosting glamorous dinner parties and efficiently freezing and labelling her home-made chicken stock. Apart from the fact that these sort of scenes make most of us feel totally inadequate, haven't women been struggling for decades to escape this sort of time-consuming domesticity? Yet Nigella's popularity, particularly among women, is soaring. I suspect it has a lot to do with all those enthusiastic male chefs encouraging our husbands to do so much of the cooking over the past ten years. Many women, like myself, probably feel it's about time we reclaimed some of the kitchen. The backlash has only just begun.

THE boys wanted to know how many days their grandfather, who died when he was 80, had lived. I did a quick calculation and came up with 30,000 days. But that didn't sound big enough, surely it should be 300,000? Sadly, no, I'd got it right first time. How many weeks, they wanted to know. 4,160. And months? 960. The boys had heaps more questions but it had occurred to me that, even if I'm lucky enough to live as long as eighty years, I've used up nearly half of those days, weeks and months already. "Go ask your father," I answered. "I don't have the time."