TWENTY years ago I would relish nights in with a bottle of wine and Sex and the City.

Like many women my age, I loved the TV series based on the book of that name by American author Candace Bushnell, about four glamorous friends living in New York, and their experiences while trying to find husbands.

How wonderful to look like that and be able to have that life, we all thought.

Now Bushnell’s latest offering, Is There Still Sex in the City?, has hit the bookshelves, centered around a set of characters embarking on dating adventures while grappling with life changes after the age of 50.

While I am sure it will be a riveting read, I can’t imagine that the content will reflect the wider 50-plus community.

My guess is that the women it features - who she dubs ‘Super Middles’ - will still be attractive, still be wearing sexy clothes and five-inch heels and still be man magnets.

Being middle aged in New York City certainly won’t be the same as being middle-aged in Bradford city.

For a start, there isn’t a great deal of ‘cubbing,’ a practice that features in the book, in which a sensible older woman suddenly becomes the love interest of a much younger man. I’ve spent years hoping that this was going to happen, but despite my best efforts and most sensible behaviour, it hasn’t.

So far as I know my friends have not hit that particular jackpot either. Younger men are more likely to see us as grandmother figures and only speak to us to ask what we did in the war. Women of my age are too embroiled in hot flushes to be of interest to hot young men. Yet in Bushnell’s world, it goes on.

And I don’t know anyone who has received the ‘Mona Lisa’ treatment, named after MonaLisa Touch, a vaginal rejuvenating procedure for older women, that restores your nether regions to a healthy state.

I suppose this goes some way towards helping them hang on to their cubs, but it certainly won’t be the talk of the WI where I live.

I don’t know about other 50-something females in Bradford but I have enough trouble fighting middle-age spread and cellulite. Restoring my private parts to peak fitness is a long way down my agenda.

However far-removed Bushnell’s world is from mine, I can identify some similarities. Now 60, she has written of Middle Age Madness, or MAM, a late-onset midlife crisis for women. I lurch from one midlife crisis to another, whether health issues, money worries or family fallouts. I am often wracked with worry about everything and frequently left wondering ‘Is this it?’.

And she has spoken of feeling invisible as an older woman, when people serving in shops don’t even look at you. I remember a couple of years ago, meeting my daughter at a pop-up bar beside a skating rink. I was behind a stream of young women who were all allowed in. As I approached a hand went up. “It’s full, you’ll have to wait,” I was told. He meant it was full of beautiful people and my seen-better-days face did not fit.

I am sure the women in Bushnell’s book won’t experience anything like this. They will be wealthy, beautiful, older versions of Sex & the City’s Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. When they are lying in bed alongside their cubs in uptown New York they won’t be working out what to buy in Tesco for tomorrow’s tea or worrying about whether they put out the recycling.

I probably won’t buy the book, but if they bring out a TV series I will definitely give it a go. As a worn out, jaded 58-year-old, it will be nice to have something to aspire to.