I watched a couple of makeover programmes on telly last night, with mixed results.

The first was How to Look Good Naked, presented by Gok Wan. This is new to me, though if memory serves, my sister is a fan. I think it's been going for a couple of years on British telly.

I can see why my sister likes it. Although the programme is a tad formulaic and also a bit loud for me, like much of British culture, Gok is the kind of gay best friend every woman needs - frank, encouraging and full of endless fillips. He is also very kind, which is a marked contrast to Trinny and Susannah. He was apparently very fat in his youth, so he has an understanding of body image.

The amount of nudity shown would have been shocking on prime-time TV even a decade ago, but it must be a relief to many women to see women of normal height and weight and degree of hairiness shown on television, talking openly about their bodies, rather than the stick-thin teenagers we're all supposed to emulate. I was once a member of The Sanctuary, so I have no illusions about what real women look like...

Essentially, HTLGN is a self-help programme aimed at improving a woman's self-esteem and in the episode shown, Gok played a couple of simple tricks that were very telling. The subject had an obsession with her 'huge' post-childbirth belly, so he lined up a bunch of women of varying waist sizes and asked her to position herself where she thought she fitted (this is apparently a staple of the programme). She placed herself with a waist measurement of about 36 inches. In fact, her waist measured 30 inches and she was a UK size 10 - her image of herself was completely off kilter. Not one subject, so far, says Gok, has ever put herself in the right place, because we all suffer body dysmorphia, thinking of ourselves as bigger than we are. 

He also got her to stand in front of a mirror and then pinned back her loose baggy clothes and cut off the excess fabric to show her quite how much she was wearing - two or three dress sizes too much, every inch of which made her look larger. This is something I wish I could do with a lot of people, to be honest. He also made her chuck out her godawful hippy wardrobe and attempt a degree of personal grooming. By the end of the programme her confidence had been so boosted that she was in her first relationship for three years, pregnant and about to get married. So much for appearances not mattering.

The programme I watched afterwards was Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation, which was a poor offering in comparison. I have always enjoyed What Not To Wear, but the new programme (on UK's Channel Four rather than the Beeb) lacks the in-depth focus on one or two subjects that always made the old series worth watching no matter how gimmicky the presentation.

Our relationship with our appearance is always a complex one, especially as woman is traditionally the 'observed' sex (read John Berger's Ways of Seeing for more on this concept), and without the psychological aspect of WHY a woman presents the appearance she does, Undress the Nation was simply a whole bunch of double-quick makeovers of people you neither knew nor cared about.

Nor did most of the women look much better afterwards than before, as they were simply dressed off the rack with whatever the presenters had to hand, rather than choosing a whole new wardrobe according to a new set of criteria, as on What Not To Wear.

On the whole, this made it much less involving, and although I might give it a couple of more tries, I have a feeling this is a programme I won't find unmissable.   

Yesterday there was another change in this house - we have gone back to British television.

For some years when we first bought our house in France, we didn't have television at all. We had a television SET, of course, but we only played videos on it (videos, remember them?...). It wasn't until I found one of our cats dead in the garden that I suddenly felt a need for access to television - simply for something to distract me mindlessly for the evening.

We opted then for a French satellite package, attempting to integrate into our new surroundings. Most of the channels, of course, were French, but there was also CNN and a couple of BBC channels, and you could watch films in 'version originale', which was fine if they were English (not so fine if, for instance, they were Korean...).

The problem was, to tell the truth, we didn't really watch the French channels. Although I love this country and the way of life, the majority of French television is utterly dire. There were some art and history programmes on channels like Premiere, but the truth was that, over the years, apart from the news, we watched the English-language channels almost exclusively.

Now, however, our provider has moved the goalposts. The film channel we enjoyed the most has disappeared. There hasn't been an English-language film we've wanted to see in months. And in October, it's all due to change again and we'll lose BBC Prime for good - no more British comedies or costume dramas.  

It was time to draw a line in the sand, and given the ability to now access Freeview and Freesat, and not pay a thing, it was also too good an opportunity to save money. Tilting the satellite dish to pick up the Astra2 and buying a second-hand digibox on Ebay has cost us a grand total of 62 quid. Our French satellite package cost 40 euros a MONTH. You do the math - it should pay for itself in eight weeks. 

Of course, this house being what it is, it wasn't as straightforward as it should have been (nothing ever is). A friend came over with a long ladder and a satellite finder, and we had to move the dish to the other end of the house and recable, owing to a massive tree that stood in the way of the signal. Then he put the bracket on the wrong way up (our fault - we didn't tell him). One way and another it took three blokes the greater part of the day to get the thing working. Meanwhile we girls were inside having a bit of a clothing bourse and lots of tea and biscuits like the helpless females we are.

But now that the thing is up and running, I am well pleased with the results. Last night we had the great pleasure of watching a Poirot, which I haven't seen in years, and on Friday, Helen Mirren will be on in The Queen. We still have CNN, and for the first time since moving to France, we finally have Radio 4, indispensible for the chattering classes. At last, considered debate on topical items, Women's Hour, but more importantly, Mornington Crescent and I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. Ex-pat behaviour it may be, but I feel like I'm back in the land of the living...

Late on parade with this blog today.

The reason is, I'm trying to buy a new woodburner.

I recently had a small windfall when my pensions company demutualised and I found myself with shares I didn't know I had. Since it was money I wasn't expecting, spending it on a new woodburner seemed like a good idea. I don't know how we'd ever afford one otherwise, and I want to do something to help my asthma. 

Our current woodburner is 11 years old, and it's the wrong type. So naive were we when we bought this house that we didn't know the difference between a freestanding stove and an 'insert', so we simply bought the latter because it was the most powerful we could find.

For those who don't know, inserts are designed to fit inside a closed fireplace. Only the front of them is visible, so the top, sides and back are all insulated to keep the heat in, and you drive the heat out of vents in the front by using fans.

However, we have an open fireplace, so what we should have bought was a freestanding stove, where the heat radiates from all sides. These generally don't have fans, though some of the newer varieties use turbo chargers that redirect the hot air so that it comes out of the bottom of the stove, reducing the ceiling temperature and increasing the floor temperature (see drawing at right).

This is the type we've opted for - the Alsace Turbo 2 from a firm called Supra. The Alsace without turbo is the best-selling stove in France and several of our friends have it, and the result is houses that are far warmer and cosier than ours. It is also double combustion and a third more efficient than our current stove, which will mean should pay for itself over the course of two to four years. 

Another mistake I made was that back when we bought this house, there wasn't really an Internet, and I had a lot of trouble calculating how much kilowattage we would need (it was the kind of information heating engineers used to keep to themselves). Eventually Country Living magazine furnished some calculations, and I came up with a requirement of 12kw, so we bought a 12kw stove.

It's never been anywhere near enough. Running both fans full pelt, we could just about cope, but our living room is 70sqm - the whole ground floor of the house - and it has quite a high ceiling. Recalculating recently on one of the many websites that now tell you how to do it comes up with a figure of 16kw - even more if you have an open staircase (which we do).  

The room is also not insulated - none of these stone houses are. Instead, it relies on something called thermal mass to stay warm. You basically heat up the stone, which radiates heat back out, and the best bet is to do it slowly and gradually. We usually light our first fire on September 1st, well before we really need it, and stoke up the house a bit at a time. This summer's been so rubbish, though that we actually lit one a day or two ago, more for psychological reasons than anything else.  

Just to complicate matters, though possibly in a good way, the French are keen to push wood heating, so you're entitled to a tax credit of 50 per cent of the cost of the stove if you install one of these whizzy new clean-burn jobs, which the Alsace Turbo is. The trouble is, we have no idea how to claim the tax credit, and I don't know anyone who's done it successfully. The criteria for obtaining it seem to vary wherever you look. One government site tells you that it doesn't matter where you buy the stove, as long as you have it installed professionally. Another says you can only claim if both the supplier and the installer are professionals. Yet another tells you that the supplier and installer have to be the same person.

It is enough to make you tear your hair out, even if it wasn't all in a foreign language. Though clearly, French people have no more of a clue than I do, as there are questions about it all over the French forums.  

I am very nervous about getting this thing wrong, because, you see, I don't know if we will ever have this kind of money to spend again in one hit, and there are plenty of other things that we need. For instance, I could easily buy a second-hand, more basic version of this stove for half the price and we could install it ourselves. No tax credit, but it would work out about the same in terms of money - a temptation when I'm not absolutely sure we're going to get this money back. And for the same cost as a new stove, I could refit the bathroom or buy a new floor for this office, plus replace both of our office windows with double-glazed ones. It is a decision I don't want to get wrong.  

Oh la. Back to the drawing board. At least I've phoned the plumber already, and he will giving me a quote on installation. A lot depends on what he says, so wish me luck.  

Dr Debra Luftman and Dr Eva Ritvo are out and about plugging their new book: The Beauty Prescription (£13.99, McGraw-Hill). 

Luftman is a dermatologist while Ritvo is a psychologist, but as friends, comparing notes, they realised that their patients had many of the same body issues - low self-esteem, poor self-image etc. Luftman's clients were looking for external solutions to their problems, while Ritvo's were looking more inside themselves, but the two women decided they could come up with a 'beauty prescription' that would work for everybody.

"True beauty," says Luftman, "isn't about being physically perfect: it's about maximising your beauty potential. When you do this, people will subconsciously want to treat you better." 

At the core of the 'prescription' is what the women call the 'brain loop' - inner beauty, health, outer beauty, environment. 

* Inner beauty covers areas such as mental and emotional well-being, self-esteem, self-awareness and self-confidence.

* Health deals with taking care of your physical health through the right nutrition, sleep and leading a healthy lifestyle in general.

* Outer beauty covers maintaining your external looks such as make-up, hair, skincare etc.

* Environment deals with your surroundings and what feedback you get from them - home, work, relationships and friends.  

The trick, says Luftman, is to keep all areas of the loop flowing. "When someone says you look beautiful, you feel more beautiful," she says. "When you feel more beautiful, you start to look after yourself more. The better you feel and look, the more positive the response you get from your environment, the more people are attracted to you and the more confident you feel."

But although this can be a positive circle, she adds, when one area isn't working, you can also end up in the opposite - a circle of negativity.

The tips are pretty basic, but they include:

* Inner beauty: do voluntary work, value your relationships, practise self-affirmations.

* Health: exercise, eat properly, get enough sleep, have regular medical checkups.

* Outer beauty: see a (non-affiliated) make-up artist for some tips, develop a daily skincare regime, replace your makeup regularly, 'dress up'.

* Environment: spend time with people you like, avoid people you don't, do little things to cheer yourself up such as putting flowers on your desk. 

Well, basic they may be, and the doctors have come in for some criticism because of it, but I wonder how many of us actually do them?

Because I practise Buddhism (though I'm not a Buddhist) I learned a long time ago to write down five positive things at the end of every day. It sounds naff, but it does help you to focus on the good things in your life instead of the bad things, while is my tendency, being the depressive sort. I also put my health before everything these days because I have an auto-immune disease which would otherwise lay me flat (hence the downshift to the countryside instead of my former caffeine-fuelled life in London). How many of us go through our makeup drawer twice a year and chuck out everything that's past its sell-by? Most of us suffer a shot across the bows like conjunctivitis before we learn that lesson (yes, I do mean me...).

Lots of women never learn to put themselves first in anything, and then whinge like martyrs that their husbands and kids boss them about (as a non parent I see this all the time with mothers). But as they say in emergency services: put your own oxygen mask on first (ie: if you don't, you're no use to anybody else) and that's not a bad tip to carry through life.

However, it strikes me from this little list that the lesson some women never learn is to cut people out of their lives who aren't worthwhile, especially when it comes to men. How many women stay in relationships that are violent, or disrespectful? And realistically, how many men do this? How many women stay with an alcoholic husband? Nine out of ten, according to stats, while nine out of ten husbands leave an alcoholic wife - very interesting.

We're even worse when it comes to family, as if there was some reason to put up with people you wouldn't otherwise be friends with in a million years. And speaking of friends, how many of us have negative friends, who do nothing but suck the mental energy out of you and leave you feeling tired?

Probably owing to my dysfunctional family, I had a habit over the years of putting up with crappy friends myself. But I do notice, thank God, that as I get older, I'm more ruthless about cutting them off. My friend T put her finger on this exactly when she said: "I don't have time to spend time with the people I DO like. I'm sure as shit not going to spend time with people I DON'T..."

For more on The Beauty Prescription, including a longer list of tips, see this article in the Mail.  

Available at: Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

Well I promised the other day that I would review the 2008 Age(less) issue of US Vogue, so here goes. 

It is a big fat disappointment.

I have always had a lot of respect for Anna Wintour. Although I don't think she's a woman I'd like to work for, she's always been very directional and keen to support new talent, but I'm starting to think lately that she's lost the plot. 

A quick flick through the August issue shows the same old names cropping up again and again - and many of them are personal friends of Wintour and her chum Plum Sykes. It looks to me like these women need to get out more and find out what's really happening in the world, rather than reviewing the same old coterie of friends issue after issue.

For instance, there's Kate Moss on the cover (again), and an unreadable interview inside, which is meant to represent women in their 30s. However, in truth it's designed solely to plug Moss's new business and is only in there because she's a mate of the editor's. Shame on them - this is crappy Tatleresque pseudojournalism of the worst sort.

Also, Moss may be a beautiful woman even in spite of the bird's nest hairdo she's been given here, but I've never read any interview with her that showed her as anything more than a self-obsessed, coke-fuelled tart.

"Kate Moss...is over airports," Sykes tells us. "She's saving up for a private jet. 'I'm going to call it the Kate Express,' she informs me, perched on a modernist white armchair in the black-lacquered sixth-floor London office suite of Topshop owner Sir Phillip Green. She's sipping tea from a black Limoges teacup..."

Well excuse me, but what bloody awful writing. It sounds like a parody for God's sake - how many names can Sykes manage to drop in one sentence? And far too many adjectives, dearie...

The fashion photo shoots aren't much better. There's one on textured skirt suits, for instance (with Amber Valletta looking like an alien). The textured skirt suit is a garment that Vogue claims suits all women over 40. No it DOESN'T! Textured suits add an horrendous amount of bulk to a frame, and most of us can't tolerate that in our 40s and 50s, when the average woman gains 20 pounds. Hit your 60s and you tend to thin out again, but even so, I'd never recommend wearing texture on both halves of the body unless you want to look as wide as the Hoover Dam. The Marc Jacobs double-breasted vomit-green wool and alpaca jacket featured is particularly nasty and near-enough guaranteed to make any woman with boobs look like a menopausal Tory councillor. Just the look I want...

The other major photo spread is on androgynous fashion, shot on Giselle Bundchen. And on her, of course, it looks pretty good. Actually, come to think of it, even on her it doesn't look pretty good. But if we were all 5ft 10 with a BMI of 17 and no tits, we might have more chance of dressing as blokes and looking fetching.

But the truth is, androgyne looks good on virtually no-one and even then, you need to be under 40 - as you get older and less 'soft' in the face, all it does is make you look butch. Devoting 10 pages to it in an issue aimed at older women strikes me as plain daft. In contrast, there is a teeny weeny little piece on 'le smoking' showing how women of all ages can look great in a well-cut, female-designed trousersuit. Thank God for St Laurent, who understood what the female body was all about.

I took issue with the article on John McCain's mother too (representing women in their 90s), but not because it was badly written (it wasn't) but only because I thought she was a fascist bitch, no matter how well she dresses.

Madame Chiang Kai Shek, the Shah of Iran and Lord Mountbatten were all good people who were misunderstood, according to her. What a bunch to have to dinner, ye gods - one man who attempted the military overthrow of a legally-elected government and two others who were responsible, between them, for the imprisonment, death and torture of thousands. It is such a shame, as I'd wanted to like her. 

The shots of Chrissy Evert (representing women in their 50s) are quite nice - she looks great in her white trousersuit. But I know she's been heavily airbrushed because she was all over UK television back in July when Wimbledon was on and in real life she looks a lot more raddled than this. This is fine - it's the price you pay for spending most of your life in the sun, playing a sport that has also given her an enviable physique. It's just a shame they felt the need to do it.

Representing the 70-year-olds, Diahann Carroll - a sassy woman if ever there was one - is shown wearing the kind of wrapover white tie-side blouse that EVERY woman over 30 should have in her wardrobe. Coupled with what looks like black pants or a skirt and a diamond necklace (I have an identical one, but it's fake), she looks fabulous.  

Mia Farrow, representing the 60-year-olds, comes across as an extremely commendable person. But by this time I'd begun to notice that these articles had very little in them about personal style, which is what they dealt with last year. It is great to have in-depth interviews with interesting women, and there's not enough of it in general, but Vogue is primarily meant to be a fashion magazine, is it not? Nevertheless it was a good read, like most of the personality articles, and I liked Farrow more after it than before. 

For women in their 80s, Vogue hit on food writer Betty Fussell. Here, we do actually get an article on personal style, and Fussell is exactly how I'd like to both be and look at her age - no-nonsense, commanding face, wonderful elegant sleek clothes for country living. But we'll never know who those clothes are by, because the main picture (of Fussell holding a goat) isn't captioned.

What the hell is going on here? It's not like Vogue just forgot, because the jewellery's listed (some of it Navaho style, which is a weakness of mine). But what I really wanted to know was where Fussell got her toffee-coloured suede skirt and fabulous leather-collared zip-and-popper duster coat. Not a mention of this in the 'In This Issue'.  

Then I turned to the beauty features, and here's where the issue really tanked completely, leaving me so annoyed that I really wonder whether I will even bother buying the magazine again. As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, I am (fervently) against cosmetic surgery, which I consider to be an assault on the body in pursuit of mere vanity. But Vogue has really taken the biscuit this time.

Nothing AT ALL to speak of in this issue on makeup or skincare (an interview with a makeup artist and a mention of a high-end spa is all). Nothing even on anti-ageing creams (which I'm frankly dubious about too, the skin being a giant lung). But three articles on invasive procedures: the running tweaks that any stylish woman - apparently - 'must' have, including having your nostrils fettled; an article on armpit surgery; and another one on knees. Not joints, or ageing cartilege, or any other important structural surgery, you understand - surgery on knee WRINKLES. 

Well, I dunno. I know I get on my high horse about this sort of thing and a woman's entitled to spend her money on what she wants, but I can't help thinking that if you're worried about your droopy nostrils and the wrinkles in your knees and armpits, you have WAY too much free time. Get a life, for fuck's sake.  

Speaking of knees, I couldn't help but notice the fetishtically high shoes worn by all the Vogue assistants in their 20s, featured in the back of the mag. Ugly shoes, all of them, that place a woman's foot virtually on point. Well, let us hope that we are all hale and hearty in our 60s, because if our daughters wear shoes like this, we're quite likely to be pushing them around in wheelchairs after their knees and backs have collapsed under the strain.  

As a final, small point. One cover line says: 'Vogue's guide to looking amazing at every decade, on any budget...'. Well, let's not kid ourselves - the budget thing is an outright lie. I have no problem with that in Vogue, but really, please don't fib about it.  

To sum up - a poor issue, could do better. Really, I'd give it zero stars were it not for the nice photos in the Tonne Goodman/Grace Coddington pieces, the personality interviews aforementioned, and another couple of good articles - one on eco-warrior Sloan Barnett and another, quite moving piece by Andre Leon Talley in memoriam of Yves St Laurent. The rest of it, I'll be using to line the cats' litter tray.