I should have done somethiing about my lifestyle ten years ago, says Jenny Eclkair after high blood pressure diagnosis

Jenny Eclair has just turned 56 and is midway through her 50-date How To Be A Middle Aged Woman (Without Going Insane) tour of the UK. Eclair was recently diagnosed with high blood pressure, after suspecting she might have it for a while.

“I was running away from it - I kept blaming white coat hypertension, wriggling my hand out of that cuff at every opportunity,” she says on why she kept putting off getting checked. Eventually, she had to be monitored for 24 hours, with a diagnosis of ‘moderately high’ blood pressure and a prescription for medication, “which is a bore. I should have been more sensible and tried to do something about my lifestyle 10 years ago, but, of course, I was just too busy having a great time to worry about blood pressure,” says Eclair.

“A lot of things catch up with you in your 50s and, all of a sudden, you’re a bit frumpy, you’re a bit gouty, you’re a bit acid refluxy.

“This puts me in a sort of amber light area of other dangers from high blood pressure, like heart attack.” Her father, who died early last year at the grand age of 90, had heart disease from his 60s onwards and had had a quadruple bypass.

“He had to go some time,” she says matter-of-factly. “He had all his marbles and we put him in a nursing home, he was bed-bound before he died for about 18 months, so he’d had enough.”

Thankfully Eclair says she doesn’t suffer from any other health problems and tries to stay as fit as she can, but it’s not always possible.

“Salt is the one you really have to watch with hypertension, but it’s so difficult to have a salt-free diet when you’re on tour. There’s a lot of convenience snacking. I do eat a lot of vegetables and I’m a salad fiend, but I also have an ‘evil crisp hand’. You know, two glasses of wine and evil crisp hand is snatching!”

As for exercise, she does Pilates and goes to the gym “under the supervision of my 27-year-old daughter, who makes me do 15 or 20 minutes on three different machines”. Phoebe Eclair-Powell, Eclair’s daughter with her long-term partner Geof Powell, is a playwright - “she’s much cleverer in an academic sort of way” - and recently moved out of the family home in London, although she “comes back to do her writing because it’s warm”.

“It’s very difficult to let go of the things that you like, and I’m not very good with change,” admits the comic, who will be coming to Yorkshire later in the year. “I do struggle with people moving out, I do struggle with my mother having to move from her cottage to a flat, even though the flat has got this fabulous view and she’s really very lucky.”

Her mother, originally from Blackpool, lives some 300 miles away from Eclair in Lytham St Annes. “She wouldn’t be happy in London, she’s got all her friends and sister up in the north.”

When the tour’s finally over in December, Eclair will go back into “writing mode”, admitting she’s still “very ambitious” .

Jenny Eclair’s How to be a Middle Aged Woman(without going insane) is touring this years.

Eclair puts middle age under the microscope and decides whether to laugh, cry or buy a dachshund!

She will be at Helmsley Arts Centre on October 11 and Masham Town hall on October 13.

For tickets and more information visit http://www.jennyeclair.com/live-dates