FREE now SUBSCRIBE Invalid email Sign up to the Secret Elves Club fornow We will use your email address only for sending you newsletters. Please see our Privacy Notice for details of your data protection rights.

Women over 50 feel invisible, says Susannah Constantine, 56. Oh dear, yes, you’re telling me. I’ve been over 50 for more years than I’m prepared to divulge but I can still remember the first time, that moment of realising how very invisible I’d become, when I was introduced to a famous rugby player at a party. We had both recently published books. How nice, I thought, we can have a good moan about how horrible publishers are. Instead, he mumbled a greeting, during which his eyes slid away to a juicier prospect the other end of the room, shortly followed by the rest of him. That’s the trouble with being a woman over 50. You just aren’t sexy any more. Susannah isn’t invisible at the moment, of course, because she’s taken the challenging step of signing up as a contestant on Strictly. Good for her.

It’s the kind of opportunity a woman over 50 must seize on to get the spotlight on herself again, even if it runs the risk of cruel jibes and humiliation. (You’ll have noticed that Susannah has gone straight to the top of the betting for first person to be eliminated.) Because the trouble is that the moment a woman does something non-invisible when she’s over 50, the only thing people are interested in is that she’s over 50. You could have eradicated world famine, come up with the answer to whether there are any odd perfect numbers, found the cure for some awful disease that’s baffled medical science for centuries. It’s the fact that you’re over 50 that everyone homes in on, as if you’re a bear that has mastered how to roller-skate. Sadly, even though women have passed so many milestones and achieved so many great things in the past few decades, the world is what it is. Like it or not, where we’re concerned being young and attractive still counts hugely. Remember that old saying about knowing you’re getting old when policemen start to look younger? I knew it was time to give up football reporting when every footballer I interviewed could have been my son.

STILL GOT IT: The TV presenter Susannah Constantine

As a general rule I refuse to recall the last time I received a flattering offer but – if I’m being honest – between then and now several general elections and World Cups have taken place. But even now, when ignored by an interesting male, I can catch myself sulking like a gawky schoolgirl whose crush has overlooked her in favour of someone older and more sophisticated. Except at least that gawky schoolgirl is going to grow up and turn into a swan, whereas a woman whose 50th birthday is behind her has nothing to look forward to, it seems, but hot flushes, elastic waistbands and being relegated to the shadows. Let’s be truthful here. It doesn’t matter how lucky you are, or how attractive – by the time you’re 50 everything has started to go downhill.

Your boobs are getting nearer the pavement every year, you have to breathe in or lie flat on the floor to zip things up, you suddenly find that your shoe collection is made up almost entirely of trainers (so comfortable) and it’s three years since you wore any heel higher than a dreary two inches. And why is your hair so straggly and thin? That only happens to men, surely. And once you reach a certain age, there are clothes you can’t wear any more. Well, you can, but it isn’t to be recommended if you want to retain your dignity, which is something that becomes infuriatingly important when you’re no longer young. I’ve always been quite proud of my legs and used to love showing them off in a mini-skirt but these days I’d look as though I was soliciting.

Trinny & Susannah.

Susannah herself points out the irony that she bounced to fame as a glossy blonde 30-something, with her co-presented Trinny Woodall, in the makeover show What Not To Wear, confidently telling people how to dress appropriately for their age and figure. “When I look back at photographs of myself I think, ‘God, I looked really good then and I was in really good shape.’ Then I go and put my clothes on – I can’t do the zip up past my waist. I think, ‘How did I ever get into that?’ ” My own moment of truth about dressing appropriately for my age and figure came when I decided to run the London Marathon, which is a very over-50 thing to do. I joined a running club and as part of my training celebrated my 50th birthday by entering a 10k race in the local park. The club had an official kit: purple vest and shorts. It was a chilly morning so I put on my red thermal hat. It was while I was toiling along, beetroot-faced from effort, that the truth dawned. I was that woman.

NO SLOWING DOWN: The model Daphne Selfe

The one in the Jenny Joseph poem that begins: When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple, and a red hat that doesn’t suit me. It’s not that a woman’s second half-century is unremittingly awful. Far from it. You’re older and hopefully wiser. If you have children, they’re grown up, and at last you have the time to develop as a person. I’ve achieved more since I passed the big five-o than I ever did when I was young: published six books (two of them bestsellers), run 12 marathons, completed a non-stop 100-mile walk, cycled to Paris. The second half of my life has so far been infinitely better and happier than the first. Becoming invisible seems a very small price to pay. But once in a while, when I’m toiling up the steep hill in my park trying to get fit for my latest ultramarathon, I can’t help thinking I wouldn’t mind swapping this for a pair of really high heels and flirting at a table for two over a nice bottle of Fleurie.

Women who became famous over 50 Mary Wesley Author of 10 novels, the first published when she was 71. Her best known book The Camomile Lawn was turned into a TV series. Daphne Selfe Signed up by top modelling agency Models 1 after appearing in Vogue at the age of 70. Barbara Woodhouse Dog trainer who become a household name at 69 with her eccentric methods for working with canines.

Kathryn Bigelow, the film director was in her 50s when The Hurt Locker won an Oscar.