My View: The Bachelor Boy and theories about the secrets of eternal youth

"Doesn't he look good on it, though!" appears to be the reaction – a rather bitter reaction in some quarters – to the pictures we've seen splashed all over the newspapers this week of the Peter Pan of Pop looking bronzed and muscular, and very hairy, as he strides out of the sea in a pose for his latest calendar. And he's half naked – at nearly 70.

There is much speculation as to how, exactly, he manages to look so young – not a day over 55, I'd say – as he approaches his eighth decade. In particular, his chest hair is being pored over, with some suggesting that he has dyed it darker (it's becoming quite the norm for men to dye more than just the hair on their head).

Plastic surgeons, however, are agreed that Cliff doesn't seem to have had anything nipped or tucked yet, and that his continuing good looks are due to a strong jaw, excellent genes and an exemplary diet and exercise regime. How disappointing.

Cliff himself says that the secrets of his eternal youth include tennis and red wine (just two glasses a day, mind, and I bet they're small ones). He's also said to take a supplement called lecithin, which is supposed to block the body's ability to store fat (really? Save some for me).

Like many annoying people who have managed not to succumb to middle-age spread, Cliff is proud of his slimness, with reports that he has been on a diet for the past 50 years. I read this week that his waist is 30in and his weight 10st 7lb (bit skinny), and it's oddly refreshing to hear this reported with the sort of envious interest usually reserved for Joan Collins or Sharon Stone. It's about time men got a taste of how their other halves live, constantly made to feel inadequate by images of the alarmingly youthful bodies and unlined faces of pneumatic celebrities, all of whom are considerably older than you are.

There is, however, another theory about Cliff's eternal youth: namely, that he looks so young and healthy and fit, and happy, because he has never had a wife.

Well, how typical. Presumably, because there has been no Lady Richard around to nag him, or take up his valuable time with shopping and choosing wallpaper and general emotional and physical maintenance, he's not acquired the careworn face and clapped-out body of your usual middle-aged married man?

I can see what's going to happen here. Rather than women being able to point to Sir Cliff and say: "If he can ripple like that at 70, why can't you?", instead we'll have men using him as an iconic example of how they, too, could look, if they had not had the misfortune to marry. So we're not just responsible for our own imperfect looks; we're to blame for our husband's, too. Again.