Now women are being told to have hourglass figures, or misery shall befall them. The well-meaning advice comes from Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister at Westminster.

She doesn't want lasses to cry because they don't look like twig-thin models.

But now they'll be crying because they don't look like Christina Hendricks, the actress whom Ms Featherstone has adduced as an ideal.

I am unfamiliar with Ms Hendricks's oeuvre — ooh-er, Missus — but, looking at pictures of her, I’m happy to declare myself a fan of whatever she does.

Incidentally, I’ve discovered why women's ideal figure tends towards the skeletal.

We can all get thin. All you do is stop eating. It's achievable. But an average woman will never be able to look like Christina Hendricks unless she has drastic surgery.

You can try eating, but all you're going to get is fat.

Ms Hendricks has been blessed by the gods with a cornucopia of accoutrements that happen to be in all the right places.

The average lass has as much chance of looking like her as I have of looking like Dolph Lundgren.

I simply have not been so blessed and could not look like him if I went to the gym seven days a week.

My knobbly knees are ineradicable, for a start.