Only slipper manufacturers and the Discovery Channel will benefit. Middle age will become a greyer and more tedious place, for everybody.Being serious, it is satisfying to see the drug companies caught out in their old trick of persuading us that we are ill so they can sell us drugs. Nobody wants to see a world where more and more so-called diseases are invented to con us into spending money on curing them. So perhaps it is time for us to put the battle of the sexes aside so we can concentrate on defeating a common enemy. Women should own up to men about the way they deal with their own personal crises, hormonal or otherwise. We have to spread the word: self-medication is the way forward.Reaching for the testosterone gel is not the answer.

Just as women turn to food, alcohol and ridiculous shoes when the sulks strike, so men should spend as much money on Buffy the Vampire Slayer videos and hair colorants as it takes to forget that they are getting old They will soon start to feel a lot better. It’s vital that we don’t let the scientists get away with sticking pins into all our neat excuses. Or they’ll be announcing that there’s no such thing as PMT next And then we’ll all be in trouble.. We are safer from crime than we have been for 20 years. But the reason people don’t actually feel safer is that they believe what they read in the tabloid press rather than trust Home Office figures. And the fact that they’ve been losing confidence in the criminal justice system hasn’t helped either. That, in essence, was the message wrapped around the crime statistics published last week.

The Home Office might have thought it persuasive, but it won’t wash

We are safer from crime than we have been for 20 years. For years, governments have relied on two different sources for their crime figures, even though they often tended to contradict each other. There were the offences recorded by the police and the Home Office’s own estimates based on the British Crime Survey (BCS). The police figures cover only those crimes which victims choose to report, and until this year the police had discretion not to record reports which later proved to be false. The figures also vary depending on whether having more crime – or more of a particular type of crime – might get your own force additional resources, or a rap over the knuckles.The BCS’s estimates, by contrast, were intended to capture people’s experience of being victims – whether or not this was reported to the police. But it, too, under-represents crime because the BCS only interviews people over 16, and then only if they live in households which are prepared to open their doors to interviewers and let them in to ask their questions.