Bring back Bridget Jones

I've got a bit of a history with Helen Fielding - or do I mean hissy-fit? Whatever, she's one of the very few fellow hacks I've known who's gone on to be far more famous than me, so my tittle-tattle stops being gossip and becomes anecdote and thus respectable.

I first met her on the roof at some boy-about-town's birthday party, a wispy, pretty blonde ordinaire. But when I was told her name, I was excited, as I'd admired her funny writing in the papers for some time.

"Oooo! I love you!" I squealed. "That piece you wrote about meeting Omar Sharif." She silenced me with a bark and a beady eye. "You've got children, haven't you?" "Two. But I'm a terrible mother. Listen, that piece about the perfume launch -" "How old were you when you had the first one?" "Twenty. But I don't live with him - I'm a bolter. The way you - " "And the second one?" "Twenty-six. Why?" "I haven't had any children, and d'you know how old I am?" "But you're a fantastic writer."

A thought struck me. "Why don't you write a book instead?" Miss Fielding looked unconvinced. A few moments later she actually uttered the words "biological clock", and I was outta there! I'd never heard a woman utter those words before; I thought all we broads knew it was a male plot, a bad joke, to keep us in our places. But she wasn't laughing!

"I've been loonered by that Helen Fielding," I complained to my husband when I found him. So, when Hels started saying in interviews how Bridget Jones wasn't her and that the biological clock stuff was a joke, I wasn't so sure. But, hell, we all said some silly things back then. I even said I'd hit her for setting the cause of feminism back 50 years, which was both silly and violent. Still, girls will be girls.

Of course, I was accused of being envious of Miss Fielding's amazing success; it's a fair enough mistake to make, but it's hard to describe to anyone outside of the malign circlejerk we know as metro-hackdom how this wasn't strictly the case.

Above all, we hacks like to think that we invariably see The Next Big Thing coming light years before anyone else does - and no one saw Helen, even though she was right there under our noses, wittering on about her biological clock. Though her little pieces in the Sunday Times Style section were a good laugh, she was never exactly a headliner; when she made it big, it was a bit like realising that your hamster had escaped from his cage - and then you turn on the TV and it's making a speech to the world from the Oval Office, because it's become President of the United States. One's flabber was well and truly gasted - more than envious, I felt absolutely cretinous that I hadn't seen it coming.

Well, a lot of chardonnay has flowed under the Bridget since then and, after two bestsellers and an admittedly fantastic film of the first book, Helen would appear to be seeking closure with her crapulous creation. Her lifelong Mission Accomplished, she's ensconced by a swimming pool in Los Angeles, up the duff by a man who writes The Simpsons and consequently, one imagines, literally laughing all the way to the bank.

What better time, then, to take one's ease and change one's tack? Sod the biological clock - bring on the biological weapons.

Olivia Joules is a journalist working for the Style section of The Sunday Times, no doubt a playful "homage" to the fact that we all accused Helen of being Bridget. Additionally, she is slender (like Helen), with blunt-cut blonde hair (like Helen) and a consistently lousy tipper (Helen is from Yorkshire). Unlike Helen, one hopes, she believes she has discovered Osama bin Laden at a party in Miami, and proceeds to chase him around the hotspots and fleshpots of the world, half with a journalist's nose for a hot story and half with a woman's eye for a sexy man. This was where I started to feel a bit queasy. "Ooo-I'm-mad-me!/Whoah he'sfit-he-is!" may well be a legitimate response to the trivial stuff of life such as calorie counting and copping off with male media whores. However, applied to the current struggle between the forces of Modernism and the forces of Medievalism - which may just turn out to be the most important conflict the world has seen - I have to say, at the risk of being called a jealous bitch, that I found it rather nauseating.