In 1989, when I was still in my twenties, I wrote a book called Ambition which sold a million copies. How apt — at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I’ve got to say that I did ambition beautifully. Made it as a teenager, consolidated in my twenties, got out of London — Ambition Central — and retired to the clement South Coast at 35. Since then I’ve lived a laid-back life of sex, shopping and spiritual growth, and loved every minute.

But in another way, how inappropriate. The cream of the joke is that even by the time I wrote Ambition, I had got where I wanted to be, and was far more interested in skiving, ducking and diving. I got the title from a book my bitter, discarded, fiercely ambitious first husband had written about me but which was never published, and I wrote the thing in a similar larky manner, mostly drunk and always sniggering.

I’ve never worked hard, not at any time in my life, and part of this comes with the territory — a media job is about as jammy as it gets, in that it makes catwalk modelling look rather like stuck-up street-cleaning. It annoys me when I hear fellow hacks prissily declaring that they’ve worked like a dog for everything they’ve got — if they’re lying, they’re charlatans, and if they’re telling the truth, they must be both unlucky and untalented, and they should vacate their cushy billet for some sparky young thing from the wrong side of the tracks who deserves it.

When my teen epic Sugar Rush (soon to be a major Channel 4 smut-fest) was published last year, there was a great deal of pointing and tutting over the fact that I was quite open about having written it in the space of ten scattered afternoons after what is euphemistically known as a “good lunch”. But what’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t work be easy? If you have to sweat and strain over it, it’s probably a sign that you shouldn ’t be doing it, and that you are punching above your weight; “If it don’t fit, don’t force it,” as my old probation officer used to say. I’m proud to say that I didn’t work hard for everything I’ve got — I had talent and luck instead.

But ambition is a lovely thing in the young; it gives teenagers a good grounding in reality and forces them to engage with the real world at a time when it is all too tempting for them to live inside their heads. Youthful ambition puts a touch of iron in the soul and enables fragile spirits to hold it together as they focus on their goal. Stories of tragic stars from Marilyn Monroe down always single out ambition as the undoing of such frail, spotlight-blinded waifs, the implication being that if Norma Jean had married a nice decent boy at 16 she’d have been fine. Well, she did — and she wasn’t. Her ambition was the only thing that held her together. For young women, especially those of the working class, ambition is often all that stands between them and a life of impoverished single motherhood. And perhaps ambition is a survival mechanism in more ways than one; maybe it’s also a biological imperative, designed to make us move to the big city and stop us inbreeding.

But here’s the rub. Ambition may look charming in our teens and twenties and even our early thirties. But once we’re halfway up our fourth decade — half the way to the grave — does it really behove us, if we don’t need to, to struggle, fret and fuss? One of the reasons I vacated my position as Queen of the Groucho Club is that as I watched my media-ocrity mates running around over the years, they began to remind me increasingly of dung beetles on a heap rather than golden go-getters on the make. And that’s so not a nice way to think about one’s friends; leaving them was the most decent thing I could have done. The men, particularly, began to look so sad and sorry to me — when I look at an ambitious man past 30, I can’t help but see a sign around their neck which says: “I’m a very bad lay indeed, which is why I’m over-compensating elsewhere.” Give me a slacker boy any time.

Just as ambition looks better and seems more appropriate — stemming as it does from necessity and/or repression rather than greed and/or neurosis — on women rather than men, blacks rather than whites and the young rather than the old, so ambition is perhaps more acceptable in the untalented rather than the talented. Because surely talent should be its own reward? To sum up, then — while ambition, like spots and self-pity, can look charming on the young, past 30 it looks rather pathetic, a) because not having achieved what you set out to by the commencement of one’s fourth decade on earth makes one look a little . . . dozy, to be kind, and a loser, to be frank. And b) not just a loser, but a selfish loser at that.

At the risk of being pompous (one of the very few things that looks better on the old than the young, incidentally), this stage of our lives should surely find us being ambitious on behalf of something greater than ourselves, be it the Protestant religion, British withdrawal from the EC or decent treatment of our dumb friends — in my case, all three. The things I wanted for myself — fame and fortune; fun, love and money; rum, sodomy and the lash — I now have in spades; the things I now want, I want on behalf of other people.

I want my young friends to write great books rather than have to go to the slog of writing them myself and, far from beating myself up over this, I find it an admirable and rather graceful stance, altogether appropriate for a person in early middle age. So you’ll excuse me if I dash now, only I’ve got a hot date with Trisha and a party-bag of bite-size Snickers. And, love it or shove it, my only ambition right now is to eat the lot.