Pleased as she is to be back on our screens, there was a drawback to her rebooted TV show for Anneka Rice.
Posing for publicity photographs aged 63, that are bound to be compared to the original Challenge Anneka shots from 30 years ago. Not least by her.
She admitted that when she first saw the pictures “I was horrified”.
Anneka, for the record, looks incredible, and still pulls off a skin-tight jumpsuit every bit as well as she did in the early 90s.
She does, however, also look older now than she did three decades ago, because she is. Ageing is a tricky business, famously “not for wimps” as they say.
‘They’ also say it’s a privilege, which is such a nauseating sentiment it’s easy to brush past.
Until something stops you in your tracks, and forces you to acknowledge it.
Three weeks ago I found a lump in my breast. I went to my GP, hoping she’d say it was nothing and tell me off for wasting her time. She referred me urgently to the breast clinic at my local hospital. My appointment would be in just over two weeks. The longest fortnight of my life.
Throughout my anxious limbo, Dame Deborah James ’ tragic story was being covered everywhere.
As I lay in the dark, sleepless night after sleepless night, pondering my potential demise, I knew if the worst came to the worst for me, there was no way I’d be as brave and inspirational as her.
I also realised another uncomfortable truth. I’m a selfish monster.
Deborah was so insistent her husband move on after her death she gave him “strict instructions” on just how to do it.
“He’s a handsome man, I’m like, ‘don’t be taken for a ride, don’t marry a bimbo’,” she revealed, “Find someone else who can make you laugh like we did.”
Honestly? I wouldn’t want my husband to move on.
I wouldn’t want him to laugh with a new wife, or ideally, ever again at all with anyone.
How dare he, when I’m dead?
And obviously there is no woman on earth good enough to raise my seven-year-old son if I can’t. I know this is terrible, and wrong.
The correct way to be in this circumstance is like Deborah, and Helen McCrory, whose husband Damian Lewis was seen with what appeared to be a new girlfriend this week.
Damian has told how weeks before actress Helen died last year, “she said to us from her bed, ‘I want Daddy to have girlfriends, lots of them, you must all love again.
‘Love isn’t possessive, but you know, Damian, try at least to get through the funeral without snogging someone’.”
Maybe you can’t be that selfless hypothetically. Perhaps it’s only when you are truly nose-to-nose with your own mortality that you can think properly about this.
Thankfully, I got the all-clear.
And my lucky, lucky husband is stuck with me, for the foreseeable at least.
