If it's true (and bear in mind this was a tabloid revelation) you would have thought that at their age they'd know better than to appear in such mindless (but curiously compelling) drivel in your middle years, surrounded 24/7 by a gaggle of neurotic whining wannabes in their twenties.

It is a doubly dumb decision considering that in your forties you could have probably racked up enough skeletons to fill the closets of Imelda Marcos' shoe emporium.

If you haven't reached your forties with sufficient said skeletons lurking then you have obviously led something of a dull, rather empty existence.

It's a given that if you're divorced then you have had "a past", "a history". That past can come back to haunt you. And this can be a problem when you meet someone in your middle years.

Now that you're a singleton reborn it is likely that the next person you meet romantically will also be old enough to have a past and it would be unfair of you to expect them to have lived life like a hermit.

If you meet someone who has, as the saying goes, been around the block a few times, you should not chastise them for this, but instead celebrate the fact that you have finally met someone with a bit of spark about them, someone who has seized the day, grabbed the ball by the horns. . . I'll stop there.

You might be concerned, however, if it later transpires that the man or woman you have met and think so much of has actually been around the block so many times he or she has completed the equivalent of Land's End to Groats in sexual conquest terms.

If you're going to move on, you must get over this and accept that you can't persecute someone for what they have done in their earlier, more naïve years – unless, of course, they happen to have been a serial killer or Morris dancer.

When you first start dating that new special person in your life it is wise not to get into intimate conversations with them too early on in proceedings about how many sexual partners they have had.

Whenever, and if ever, you're feeling bold enough to broach the subject, the chances are you won't get an honest answer anyway. Women will always reduce the number by half and blokes will always increase the number fourfold.

So if a middle-aged man tells you he has slept with just three women in his life he's probably a 40-year-old virgin.