My thrilling secret affair with a a lot older man now merely appals me: BRYONY GORDON

You never forget your first deeply inappropriate relationship with an older man.

Just ask Patsy Kensit, who’s been reminiscing about the secret affair she had many moons ago with the late Terence Stamp, when she was 23 and he was old enough to know better – 53, in this case.

‘I had a lost few months with Terence when I was very young,’ she said in an interview at the weekend, about the relationship they shared while filming the 1991 movie Prince of Shadows.

‘It was all a dream and he was the perfect gentleman,’ she added, just in case anyone was concerned that something untoward had gone on as they shot the movie, in which Stamp played a heroic soldier and Kensit a beautiful prostitute.

‘He was living in Piccadilly, in an incredible apartment with a roaring fireplace and a big, beautiful kitchen,’ she swooned of the Sixties icon who died last year at the age of 87.

‘The doorman would let me in – he had a twinkle in his eye and would say, ‘Are you here to see Mr Stamp?’ I imagine he had many visitors… Even though there was an age gap, we had a strong bond. He was an amazing and generous lover.’

Why does Kensit’s breathless description of her time with Stamp give me the ick? Perhaps it’s because I also spent my 20s in a series of secret relationships with much older men.

Unlike Kensit, who seems to look back on this time with dreamy fondness, I feel embarrassed, ashamed and a bit sad for the version of me who believed happiness could be found in a man old enough to be my father.

Patsy Kensit has been reminiscing about the secret affair she had many moons ago as a 23-year-old with the late Terence Stamp, who was 53 at the time

Still, back before I discovered therapy and the concept of ‘daddy issues’, I genuinely found an older guy to be an aphrodisiac like no other. I had my first age-gap entanglement when I was 18 and working at the Edinburgh Festival one summer – he was 45, and had a comedy act involving puppets.

I know how that reads now, but at the time I simply thought he was mature and worldly and – crucially – nothing like the spotty 18-year-old oiks I was used to hanging out with back in suburban London. The ones who snogged like washing machines and didn’t know the slightest thing about sex.

For three heady days he made me feel understood, until it was time for me to hop back on the train and get my A-level results. I never heard from him again, but I was hooked.

I tried to go out with men my own age, but they never lovebombed you with quite the narcissistic aplomb of a guy in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

Indeed, in my 20s, while most of my friends were settling down with boys they met at university, I was embarking on a series of love affairs with blokes old enough to be thinking about their pension, most of them hurtling towards 50 while I had barely turned 21.

Like the relationship between Kensit and Stamp, these affairs always seemed to take place in secret – behind the closed doors of hotels, usually. And while most sane humans would see this for the dysfunctional sign it was, I was not sane, and so saw it as wildly exciting.

My longest age-gap relationship took place in my late 20s, with a man almost 30 years older than me, whom I met through work. He had a wardrobe of Savile Row suits, a Porsche and an apparently estranged wife who didn’t understand him. It’s embarrassing now, to see the extent of my gullibility, but I suppose these things are cliches for a reason.

He asked me out for champagne. This felt unspeakably sophisticated, given I lived in a damp basement flat with silverfish. He was funny and clever, not to mention handsome in that annoying, silver-fox way men get to be as they age. I probably wouldn’t have looked twice at him when he’d been in his 20s, and not just because I hadn’t been born yet.

Like Terence Stamp, he was a generous lover, which enabled me to ignore the fact he was a morally questionable human who wasn’t as estranged from his wife as he’d first made out. We were two consenting adults, of course, but looking back, I can see I was deeply unwell with alcoholism and depression, almost constantly inebriated and very often hysterical with longing for this man who was never fully there.

To be honest, I feel almost as sorry for that version of him as I do for that version of me – he was clearly going through a mid-life crisis and we were both as pitiful as each other. When I wrote about this two-year long ‘relationship’ in a book some years later, I was amazed by the number of women who messaged me about their own secret affairs with much older men, and how mortified they were by them.

It was a tale as old as time, and one I am glad to have got through relatively unscathed. (I grew bored of him, and eventually left him for someone actually available). Imagine if we’d ended up together? I’d be stuck with a man staring down the barrel of his 80s.

Funnily enough, I did end up marrying an older man: my husband Harry is 33 days older than me, to be precise. Thank goodness I grew out of my infantile age-gap obsession, and realised that the most grown-up thing to do is to settle down with someone your own age.

Lewis Hamilton with Kim Kardashian – who are rumoured to be dating after being snapped together in the Cotswolds and Paris

Will we really ever call Kim, Lady Hamilton? 

Celeb watchers will be pleased that there’s a new super couple on the scene: KLewis (that’s Kim Kardashian and Sir Lewis Hamilton). They’ve been spotted checking into the luxury hotel Estelle Manor in the Cotswolds and both were later seen in Paris. Just one question: if this gets serious, are we going to have to call her Lady Hamilton? The landed gentry won’t like that one bit. 

Stay at home if you don’t like kids, Jan

How to save the beleaguered hospitality industry? Ban the likes of presenter Jan Leeming, who took to social media this week to whinge about noisy children in the pub she’d been to for lunch. ‘Lovely ambiance – slightly spoiled by a screaming child,’ she wrote on X.

It’s not just the price that puts young families off eating out – it’s people like Jan, who seem to think they have a God-given right to complete peace and quiet when they go out in public. Like miserable holidaymakers who moan about children on flights, Jan could do with displaying a bit of empathy towards parents who are just doing their best – or else she can always stay at home, where nobody can bother her.

London-born singer Lily Allen late last year released her album West End Girl, which she has described as a ‘really angry record’

Lily’s right to voice her rage

Lily Allen has been talking about the redemptive power of rage, describing her latest album, West End Girl, as a ‘really angry record’. ‘Rage is powerful and necessary, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to express,’ she added. Damn right – and though a pop album may seem trivial to some, I hope it allows lifelong people pleasers and good girls to see that it’s perfectly OK to be furious.

Indeed, given that the news is dominated by the awful misogyny and corruption in the seemingly endless Epstein files, I’d be surprised if there was a woman alive right now not consumed with blistering, red-hot rage.

Here’s what I want to tell Gen Z

A whopping 73 per cent of Gen Z feel exhausted, according to a new survey. And 69 per cent believe themselves to be more tired than their parents’ generation. Meanwhile, 100 per cent of me would like to tell them there’s nothing more dull than a human who complains about being tired all the time. Yawn.