If you do even the most cursory study into what you, personally, can do to save the planet and benefit your health at the same time, it becomes uncomfortably apparent that you should probably give up meat.

All in all, meat is a pretty bad idea. Animal fats are the biggest cause of coronary heart disease in the west. Cows and pigs bred for meat use up a huge amount of land that could be put to agricultural use. Obtaining meat involves slaughtering the animal, to its inevitable suffering. Acres of Brazilian rainforest are lost every day in order to put land to meat production - mainly for populations that are already obese. 

Well, we all know the math. 

The problem for the average Brit is that our whole cuisine is founded on meat. And most of us enjoy meat. There is something about getting your gnashers round a nice juicy steak that a carrot burger just can't match. But at the same time, most of us don't relish the idea of the animal suffering so that we can eat it. So we do that fancy mental two-step that enables us to carry on doing something we know at heart is morally reprehensible.

Our Christian heritage is also a problem. Unlike some other religions, there has never been a moral imperative in Christianity to avoid meat in the modern era. Fish on Fridays is an idea long-gone, and for many centuries, access to meat for many people was so rare in any case that choosing to avoid it was not an issue. People ate meat whenever they could get their hands on it.

That situation is markedly different in other parts of the world. Jains in India, for instance, abstain from all meat and fish on the principles of non-violence. They also don't eat eggs; honey; any vegetable that 'bleeds' like blood when it's cut; root vegetables, in case insects are killed when they're harvested; or after sunset - in case insects are fatally drawn to the lamplight. One way or another, I sometimes wonder what Jains actually have left to live on. 

However, the rich tradition of vegetarianism that results from these strictures, and is found elsewhere in the East, particularly wherever there is a Buddhist tradition, results in a fabulous vegetarian cuisine - something we lack in the west. Eating veggie meals becomes positively enticing when a big Thali is laid out before you.

I would therefore advise anyone who wants to cut down their meat consumption to look to other cuisines for vegetarian inspiration, especially Indian. And if not Indian, then Mexican, or Spanish, or French, or Italian - all of these traditions have excellent veggie meals, such as pizza, ratatouille, chilli, guacamole etc, which are eaten simply as part of the cuisine, not as poor substitutes for meat-based meals, as so much British vegetarian cuisine seems to be. 

You could start by having one veggie day a week. In this house, it's usually Wednesday - the mid-week meal - and we'll generally have something like a ratatouille or a non-meat chilli, or a chickpea curry.

Even if you never progress further than this and remain a meat-eater the rest of the week, you have just dramatically reduced your carbon footprint - and that's something worth aiming for.

Gokking is one of a girl's private pleasures and sadly for my husband, the times when he is banished to the office with his earplugs in are becoming more frequent. In addition to Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings, the poor man now has to retire on Tuesday nights as well, for How to look good naked... with a difference.

I've long thought that many of the women on Naked are suffering from a terrible body dysmorphia. Sure, many of them aren't exactly oil paintings, but who is? Many of these women can't SEE themselves as they are at all. They need help, and they get it - and despite my general squeamishness about parts of the format of this show, the transformation of confidence is often uplifting to behold.

However, the last series began to take a more serious turn when Gok styled Kelly, a young woman who had lost a breast to cancer. Suddenly here was a person with a real and serious problem of disfigurement who needed a careful and loving touch to get her confidence back. 

Gok, as everyone knows, was once the fat kid on the block, and being fat, gay and an ethnic minority probably means you know a thing or two about exclusion. Seeing Kelly blossom under his tutelage was curiously moving for a programme that is meant to be about the most shallow of issues - our appearance ('funny how poignant cheap music is...'). 

And so it is with this new series, which is taking a look at the practicalities faced by disabled people in simply getting something the rest of us take for granted - clothes to wear. Tops that don't ride up in a wheelchair, jeans that will accommodate a prosthetic leg, a colour-co-ordinated outfit when you're blind. 

Tracey, a young mum in a wheelchair was first up. She couldn't see past her crinkly stomach (something we all have when we sit down) and the chair itself, which she loathed. Her striking blue eyes and fabulous coathanger shoulders - legacy, no doubt of hauling herself around on crutches - had become invisible to her. 

Until this series I had never wondered how you get on a pair of skinny jeans when you can't point your toe, until this problem was mentioned (the answer, bless his little Gok heart, was ankle zips). Nor had I realised that most people don't get a decent prosthetic leg that matches the other one. If these things are available, why the hell can't everyone have one? Perhaps Mr Bolland could give up some of the £15 million salary he's just landed for being a frock salesman....

I assume I'm also not alone in being gobsmacked by blind lady Di's little speaking gizmo that tells her what colour her clothes are (it identified Gok's skintone - to his chagrin - as 'dark orange'), but it still took him as an expert stylist to find clothes that were both sensual to the touch and looked right for her body shape. Di is a magistrate, for God's sake - someone who has an important function in public life. The last thing she wants is to look like a little old lady. 

There will, of couse, be people who carp about this programme - why a special series just for the disabled, for instance - but it strikes me as a good start for its simple acknowledgement that there are shedloads of disabled people in our society and they have a right to be accommodated.

Fashion so often seems aimed at solely the young, thin and alien-faced but everybody buys clothes and 99 per cent of us don't look like fashion models. Nor I am, personally, too young to remember a time when some idiots protested against buildings even having wheelchair access because it would 'inconvenience the able-bodied' - an attitude that would now strike most people as contemptible.

Let's hope that following on from this series there will be others, incorporating disabled people in among the other protagonists where they properly belong.

There's a little bit inside all of us that wants to look glamorous.

As any of my friends could testify, I actually look nothing like the pictures of me on this blog. These photos are the result of a 'Hollywood' photo session the DH and I played around with a couple of years ago. In real life I don't lie around on fox furs and pearls and I too have spots, freckles, wrinkles and all the rest of the issues that face most women.

But I'm also lucky enough to be married to Steve - who knows his way around Photoshop. 

Having been hugely impressed by his various photos of me that were pinned up around the room at our Black and White party, some of my girlfriends expressed a wish to be 'done' in the same way. So on Saturday we had a girls night in and two of them duly posed (while the rest of them stood around and made comments, naturally). 

First up was Mikki, and here she is, thoroughly glamour-pussed. I did my bit with make-up and clothes (she's wearing a full 'Marilyn' makeup and swathed in metallic organza - not that you can tell), but the DH did the rest - the cleverest thing is that he's made her hair longer.

As Mikki - mum to a 12-year-old daughter and who stomps around in DMs - would be the first to admit, she doesn't look like this every day, but this is how she'd like to look, and now she's got a fabulous photo to show her future grandchildren. 

Second to give it a try was Alex, swathed in 1930s furs and looking phenomenally elegant - a big change from her usual wellies and jeans as she pulls baby lambs out of her pet sheep. 

The rest of the girls wimped out on the night - convinced, I think, that they are beyond repair, though I suspect they may change their minds once they see the pictures. 

In real life, of course, both girls looked more drag queen than diva. The thick, matt makeup required to stand up to the photographic lights is unpleasant to wear, and the eye makeup is black and white in order to gain maximum contrast. When I did it, I was itching to get it off my face afterwards but I hear that Alex decided to keep hers overnight and went to bed in full slap, hoping some of it would still be there the next day.

Given the date, I suppose I should post at least something about Valentine's Day.

The problem with Valentine's Day is I think it's utter crap - a con trick by the greetings cards manufacturers to persuade us to part with our hard-earned cash. Why women fall for this fake romance bollox is utterly beyond me and it goes past in this house without notice, which is the way I prefer it. 

But, having had my ten pennorth of bile, for those who prefer to mark the day in some way, here are some ideas:

At http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatpicturegalleries/7093317/National-Trust-Romance.html  is a list of National Trust locations with romantic connotations.

At http://holidays.lovingyou.com/valentine/ you can find recipes with champagne, heart stamps and ideas for holidays. 

At http://holidays.kaboose.com/valentines-day/ you can find Valentine's craft ideas for all the family. 

As a dedicated buyer of vintage clothing, I must say it's a bit of a wake-up call when the vast majority of the 'vintage' now on sale is from the 1980s.

How can it be? That was MY era. Wasn't it yesterday?

Well, mmn, no, it wasn't - what a sad truth that is.

When I first began seriously collecting vintage clothes at about the age of 11, it was 1974. At that time I was entranced by Victorian and Edwardian whites (I was a romantic sort of child), but I quickly moved on to the silks and velvets of the 1920s and 1930s. At this time, this was clothing that had been made about 40-50 years before I was born - when my grandparents were young - and that made it truly 'vintage'. 

In my 20s, I collected fashion from the 30s and 40s. By the time I reached my 30s, I had expanded into collecting clothing from the 50s and very occasionally the early 60s - clothing made 10 years before I was born, or roughly contemporary with my birth. Still felt vintage enough for me.

I had a bug up my ass about the 1970s for a long time - growing up in a working-class family in this era, all I recall is the godawful crimpelenes and nylons, the flares of static that occurred every time you took your clothes off, the ghastly colours and prints. Now, I am just about able to accept that the 70s also produced some high-end clothing and may have had something to offer. So that is clothing from when I was a young girl.

But the 80s? How can this be? How can something that I wore in my heyday, be vintage?

This is not, of course, how the young see it. For them the 80s is a long time past. Looking at the 80s, and knowing nothing of the political turmoil of those days, all they see a delightfully kitsch era, characterised by rubbish music, mad hair, bling everywhere, and loads of colour. 

And of course it was like that - not that we noticed at the time. We never noticed the big hair and the poofy sleeves, the plethora of metallics and sequins, the zinging magentas, blues and purples - it was just the way things were, the ever-turning circle of fashion. When my friend Fergus had his bubble permed hair dyed in alternate locks of ash blond and golden blond, we thought nothing of it, nor of the fact that he tucked his baggy pants into his pixie boots - all 6 foot 4 of him. 

When the teenagers and 20-somethings of today wear 80s clothes, they are dressing up in their mums' frocks, just as my friend Becky and I used to do with her mum's 1950s rayon shirtwaists with their neat piping and collars and cuffs. But for kids now, 80s clothes are worn with a massive dose of irony. Words often attached these items when on sale are 'trashy', 'bling', 'transvestite', 'kitsch', 'grunge', 'goth', 'rockabilly'.

They wear our clothes as a joke - it was a crap era and they know it. Is it a shame or not that we ourselves didn't? 

Oh well. I only wish I'd hung on to more of it, frankly.  Now, I could spit. The Chesterfield jackets with football-player shoulders from Alexon and Planet; the Wallis coatdresses with contrasting collars and cuffs; the beaded bustiers and picture sweaters covered in scottie dogs and sheep. Five years ago, I couldn't even give them away - sell them now and I'd be minted.