If a friend can't tell you, who can?

GIVE ME A BREAK:I'VE REACHED THE stage in life where I can't resist giving other people advice.

Of marriageable age with your biological bomb ticking? I'll have you married off in three weeks. Pregnant? I'll want to know every detail. Want to get pregnant? My loopy take on the spiritual aspects (having been through an infertility crisis) will have you walking away after two sentences.

Call me a batty old crone, for that's what I seem determined to become, though I have resisted saying to passing mothers with prams on the street: "That baby should be wearing a hat!" I've become one of those women who thinks she deserves an honorary degree from the university of life. By now, I've been through just about every personal crisis imaginable and I'm still standing. This means either I'm a genius at coping and have every right to dole out advice or, alternatively, I've been doing something very wrong by walking myself into every crisis imaginable and have no right to be doling out any advice whatsoever.

No matter, at my age in a previous century I'd have either been dead or in a comfortable chair by the fire. I can easily imagine my crone-self in a snowed-in cottage in the far north, stirring a pot, handing out cures. Or, in the 18th century, I'd be the ultimate Jane Austen harridan marrying off every girl in the village.

A friend told me recently about her new boyfriend - a guy so wonderful he has moved continent for her. We girlfriends went out for dinner. It was Jane Austen's Emmameets Mastermind, thanks to me. "How did you meet him? Where did you meet him? What does he do for a living? Have you met his parents? How did you get along with his mother? His sister? (Very telling, a man's relationship with his close female relatives.) Has he met your parents? What did they think? Did he like your father? What did he think of your mother? Has he property?"

"Yes, he has property."

"Do his parents have property?"

"Yes."

I won't give you those details, because that would take this column into the area of confidence-breaking, which I don't do. Suffice it to say, that my reaction was: "Really? I'm impressed. Marry him immediately."

But my friend is carefree and independent. She would never in a million years marry for anything as frivolous as money. I'm not sure what she's looking for really, because there's one question I never ask: "How's the sex?" Her glowing complexion and that special wiggle in her hips tells me all I need to know.

So why doesn't she marry him? What's she waiting for? It occurs to me then, that maybe she doesn't want to get married at all. Maybe she's quite happy to move from lover to lover and I'm being a horrible old biddy for suggesting that a house, babies and a husband are the answer.

Another friend is pregnant. I won't say that I knew it long before she told me. I won't say that I saw it in her blooming breasts. And I won't say that it thrilled me to bits - so much so that I have to resist making my reservation to be one of the first visitors to hold the gorgeous little human being inside her.

Instead I say, "Don't read pregnancy websites - they'll freak you out. Don't read pregnancy books - they're even worse. Don't take advice from anyone except your mother. Who's your obstetrician? What hospital are you booked with? Do you know your maternity leave entitlements?"

My friend humours me for about two seconds. "I don't take advice from anyone. I already decided that."

That's me put in my place then. "I promise not to say another word."

"Good."

She also asks me to stop talking so loudly.

What has possessed me to be so obnoxiously wise? Other women's milestones awaken something in me. I get far more excited about their promotions and pregnancies and anniversaries than I do about my own. I seem connected to some sort of interactive life-design Google site that has me caring more about about real women's lives than about the last novel I read.

Life has become one huge soap opera. I want women to decide, NOW, and stop dithering. And when they prevaricate, I want to be the outboard-bound expert at the top of the cliff - the woman with the clamp-ons and safety equipment who says: "Jump - it'll be okay!"

It's as though, from my own mistakes, I want to help make everything (almost) perfect for other women. I want them to experience the highs of true love and pregnancy and childbirth and nesting without the lows. I delude myself into thinking that I could help them avoid the lows, if only they'd listen to me.

Then I think of all the good advice I was too scared to take. Such as (18 months ago at the peak of the boom) the wise woman who said, "Sell now and move to the country". I suppose I didn't listen to this and many other gems for the same reason that others turn a deaf ear to me. Each of us has our own mistakes to make. Mistakes are what make us human.

But damn it, it's so darn hard to keep your mouth shut when you see other people's mistakes lit up like diversion signs in the road at night. If only I could see my own.