AT last, more than 40 years after everyone else, I’ve fallen in love with Paul McCartney. I always preferred George Harrison or John Lennon and, in any case, was more of a Rolling Stones girl myself. But now I love Paul, even despite his very peculiar hair colour.

And that’s because he’s fallen in love again. After his first, idyllic marriage to Linda ended with her death, his second ended in a much publicised slanging match with Heather Mills, who gave him a daughter but took his dignity and £24m, he’s now announced his engagement.

Sir Paul, 68, is to marry Nancy Shevell, 51.

Because she is indescribably rich, he has no fears that she’s after his money. The wedding is apparently going to be small and simple, families only. But even so. There was probably no need to actually get married.

They could doubtless have carried on the way they have been, sharing homes and lives on both sides of the Atlantic.

But Paul thought differently and has apparently bought her a 1925 vintage Cartier diamond to prove it.

Fantastic. He’s still not too old to take a risk, take the plunge, hope for eternal happiness. This, he says, is for keeps. Well, he hopes so, anyway.

It’s not careful or calculated, watchful or suspicious. It’s the triumph of hope over experience. An affirmation that even at 68 you can forget the bad experiences, throw caution to the winds and throw in your life’s lot with someone else and trust them implicitly with your happiness.

It’s a fine thing to do at 20. At 68, when life should have made him cynical and wary, it’s even more romantic and splendid.

And I love him for it. Just a shame now he’s spoken for.

Congratulations, too, to actress Harriet Walter, about to get married for the first time at the age of 60.

Romance is clearly wasted on the young.

Strange idea of success

IT’S a long time since I’ve defaced an advertising hoarding – once a regular pastime in my campaigning youth – but this week I was sorely tempted.

It was an advert for a phone. “Success is having a better smartphone than your friends,” it said.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It made my fingers itch to dash into the nearest shop and buy a can of spray paint.

Is this how we measure success these days – having an expensive little toy that your friends can’t afford.

Making them jealous, envious, resentful?

It’s a strange idea of success. An even stranger idea of friendship.

Success is nothing to do with having a better smart phone than your friends. Success is having friends who couldn’t care less what sort of phone you have – as long as you have time to talk.

Best of all, I can’t even remember the name of the phone company. So, not just an objectionable ad, but not even a very effective one either.

Where the schools fail, the bosses take over

ALMOST half of Britain’s big companies are having to run remedial classes to teach new recruits how to read, write, fill in a form, add up.

School leavers are struggling with simple maths and writing memos, as well as team-working, problem-solving and dealing with customers. So where the schools failed, the bosses are taking over.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to get the boss of Tesco to organise our school system? Then we might get things right from the very start.

Health & Safety

A STATION master has been sacked for breaching health and safety rules when he went on to the track to remove a supermarket trolley just before a train was due.

Goodness knows what the bosses would have done with The Railway Children. Present them with watches?

More likely, they’d haul them into court for trespass.

Paying tax can be very taxing

ALL I wanted to do, as a good law abiding citizen, was to pay my Richmondshire council tax. I tried online. It wouldn’t take my card. I tried over the phone. Lines open 24/7. No they weren’t.

“There is no one available to take your call,” said the recorded message.

Next day I tried again, pressed all the right buttons, just like the voice told me to.

“You have entered an invalid number,” said the voice.

No I hadn’t. Tried again. Same response.

So I gave up and wrote a cheque and took it to the post, where there was going to be no collection for four days. Gosh, it’s great to live in the 21st Century.

But what will we do when cheques are abolished?

If she’d sell her former husband...

IF you were getting married, would you invite your uncle’s ex-wife, who he divorced 15 years ago?

Of course not. Yet Sarah Ferguson, inset, has told American TV viewers how hurt she was not to be invited to William and Kate’s wedding. She would have liked, she said, to be there to help her girls get dressed. Mmm... Instead she went on holiday to Thailand and “embraced the jungle”.

Is this woman completely bonkers?

In her interview with Oprah Winfrey she also managed to get in lots of mentions and link herself with Princess Diana.

Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew split up in 1992. They have been divorced since 1996.

Definitely time to move on and stop cashing in on her ever-looser connections with royalty.

When her invitation failed to drop onto the mat, she said: “I went through a phase of feeling totally worthless.”

Last year it was revealed that she was prepared to sell access to her ex-husband for half a million pounds. Just think what she could have done with a whole royal wedding to play with.

AND if you can’t beat them... turn the tables and raise money for charity.

After the £1,000 wedding hat of Princess Beatrice (pictured far left) caused all sorts of internet hilarity – a loo seat was the least of it – she has sportingly put it on eBay, hoping to raise a few bob for charity. Nice one Bea.

Backchat

Dear Sharon,
FOR as long as I can remember my father had an allotment.

When we were children it meant we had a steady supply of good fresh vegetables to eke out mum’s housekeeping.

Carrots have never tasted as good as those dad grew on the allotment.

In later years, after my mother died, the allotment was a great hobby. It kept dad fit and gave him something to do, somewhere to meet his friends for a chinwag. He also kept all his elderly neighbours in the bungalows supplied with vegetables too, so they had the benefit and he liked the feeling that he was doing something for other people.

The allotment made a real difference to my father’s life for over 50 years and it would be a great shame if other people didn’t get the same chance.

Joan Cooper, Durham.

Dear Sharon,
WE had Christmas trees at our wedding too. Ours were outside lining the path near the entrance to the porch as the church was doing repair work on the graveyard and we wanted to screen it. It was very effective and I know others who are thinking of doing something similar.

Gemma Ferguson, Stockton