She's nearly 50, but she has the body of a 25-year-old? How does she do it? Yes, Binns Minor, we are talking about Madonna, and no, she hasn't been grave-robbing, though it's always nice to see an old joke exhumed. If you had read the lifestyle article beneath the amusing headline, Binns Mi., you would have discovered that she does it by working out with a tiny fitness guru, name of Tracy Anderson, for two hours a day, six days a week.

Even allowing for a degree of airbrushing, Madge looks in dangerous good shape in the pictures for the launch of her new single, dressed in a teeny black mesh vest and knickers above the strapping thighs that sprout disconcertingly from the whippy little bodies of dancers and horsewomen. “If you want to work out like Madonna, you can. Stop making excuses - just do it,” urges the two-page account of the diva's fitness regimen.

Yes, yes, yes, all right. Naturally, as Madonna's contemporary, I'm dead keen to keep up with the old girl in matters of fitness. Already I have the horsewoman's thunder thighs and in due course I dare say I can muster the core strength and all the rest of it, bar the massive cleavage. Only hang on a minute, will you? I've had a grim day at the wordface and I'm just going to have a glass of wine or several before I embark on my 100 reps of grands pliés.

Ugh, but who's this, looming around the living-room door where I sit slumped in front of EastEnders, watching Tanya going all Thérèse Raquin with heavenly Sean? Why, it's Dawn Primarolo, the Public Health Minister, rattling a ghastly chain made of empty bottles of cava and wine glasses with the stems snapped off so they look a bit like breasts. Speak, Spirit! “Up to 2,000 woman a year die from breast cancer linked to alcohol,” says the vision, reading from a thick brief in its ethereal hand. Ministers, it adds, have focused too much on teenage “binge drinking”, to the exclusion of other age groups. The Government has responded with a £10 million advertising campaign that aims to educate women about the health risks of drinking, especially among the middle-aged middle classes.

“There is a group of middle-aged women who have been consistently drinking above the recommended level without realising it,” says the wraith, with a reproving glance at my glass of excellent St Veran. “This group is under everybody's radar. There is a great deal of harm being caused to them - liver disease, unplanned pregnancies, ruptured bladders. This is dreadful stuff.”

Dreadful indeed, though to be fair, a British Medical Journal report last year described just three incidents of alcoholrelated ruptured bladders among women - the first documented cases among women in the world, as it happens. In each case the patient was in her twenties or early thirties - not exactly the target group for the shock advertising campaign. As for unplanned pregnancy, speaking for myself, I would regard any such thing as a blessing, not to say a miracle. I am starting to wonder what, exactly, is the official Department of Health definition of “middle aged”.

It is true that the statistics of alcoholrelated disease among women aged 35 to 54 make worrying reading. In the years between 1991 and 2004, alcohol-related deaths among women in this age group doubled, from 7.2 to 14.8 per 100,000 - a larger increase than for any other age group. But I wonder why this should come as a surprise to anyone at the DoH. If Dawn Primarolo really believes that middle-aged women drinkers are “under everyone's radar”, she must have an exceptionally short memory. It is just 14 months since her colleague Fiona Jones, MP, died of alcoholic liver disease, aged 49. In her occupation, as well as her age, Fiona Jones was typical of the new group of problematic women drinkers: of the 4.9 million women classed by the Government as “hazardous drinkers”, it is women in higher managerial jobs who are likely to drink most. Faced with this statistic, the question that comes to mind is, why? Are these managerial lushes getting bladdered for fun? Or is there some other reason? Might they, for example, be self-medicating with alcohol because they are unbearably stressed and wretched? I ask only because if it is the latter rather than the former, Ms Primarolo may just have wasted her ten million quid.

Say you're a twentysomething who drinks too much because you like the bold, dizzy feeling that comes from a skinful of WKD. Confronted with the DoH's ad campaign, you might conceivably conclude that cirrhosis or breast cancer is too high a price to pay for a night out. But now imagine that you're a fortysomething executive, arriving home after a horrible day at the office to discover the fridge empty, the children in tears over their homework and the husband complaining of his dreadful day at the office.

You know that the side-effects of stress can include high blood pressure, heart and digestive problems and certain cancers. Also that taking HRT can involve elevated risk of heart disease, stroke and certain cancers. As you reach for the glass of wine that will blur the memory of your ghastly day and restore your spirits sufficiently to rustle up supper, help with the homework and sympathise with the old man, a grisly DoH advert flashes up on the telly, featuring graphic imagery of broken wine glasses looking like breasts. Do you think, “Ooh, better put that glass of wine down and get on with my two-hour Madonna-style workout so that I, too, can have the liver of a 25-year-old”? Or do you think, “Gaah. If the drink doesn't get me, the stress will. I'll just have another little drop before I get on with the supper”?

Because if it's the second, it is hard not to conclude that at least some of that £10 million might have been better spent on trying to find out what it is about the lives of middle-aged women that drives them to drink in such quantities. And then treating the cause of the malaise, rather than its symptom.

That buzzing is not a sign of busy bees
A warning comes from the teachers' union NASUWT that educational standards are being undermined by devious pupils who wear down their beaks with orchestrated coughing and humming. “Do you know anything about this?” I ask my resident educational expert, who admits, a bit shiftily, to having “once or twice” enlivened the longueurs of a Latin lesson by the mass humming of the Dam Busters' March, which would be enough to send me shrieking from the room (though his Latin teacher is made of sterner stuff and simply affects not to hear). Mass humming is not a modern phenomenon. Turning to my copy of Colette's Claudine at School, first published in 1900, I find Claudine reminiscing about a dull afternoon in the schoolroom: “We began to buzz. At first the buzz was no more than a bee-like hum; then it rose and swelled until it forced an entrance into the ears of our infatuated teachers ...” The inexperienced young teachers said to feel victimised by such behaviour from their modern pupils might care to borrow some of the 19th-century techniques of Claudine's headmistress, the redoubtable Mlle Sergent, who takes no prisoners when it comes to buzzing: “Silence! I shall keep the class in until six o'clock! Any girl who does not know her lesson will do extra homework for a week!” Bzzz.

Gator aid
Anthea Tonner, a post-graduate student at the University of Strathclyde, has been asking people about their favourite cookbooks, and spinning a theory from the responses. Delia-fanciers are family orientated, apparently, and acolytes of Nigella Lawson are “achievers without fuss”. Wonder what conclusions she would draw from my own personal favourite, Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking, whose useful recipe for alligator tail sauté concludes with the encouraging words: “It's so good, you'll wanna lay down and scream.”

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