Cigarettes: I don’t smoke. I eat mars bars instead. Calories consumed: a perfectly reasonable amount plus a perfectly unreasonable number of mars bars. Units of alcohol: three million and six, mostly consumed since I heard the news that Bridget was back.

You know who I mean, of course. the most famous diarist since Samuel Pepys, the most famous smoker since Churchill and the most obsessive calorie counter since ever – Bridget Jones. The character invented by Helen Fielding as the protagonist of a column in The Independent first appeared in book form in 1996. The sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason followed in 1999 and now we have a third instalment – Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy.

G – as Bridget herself might say – aaaah! That woman (and it’s a testament to the power of her creation that I am referring not to Fielding but to Jones) is the bane of my life.

Jones I and II came out when I was in my 20s and ruined them by holding up a vision of one’s 30s (absorbed by cultural osmosis even if you didn’t read the books) as a vale of desperation, neuroses and selfpitying tears that made me wonder if suicide would be a nobler option. Was this what I had to look forward to? Weighing and berating myself? Could congenital idiocy actually come in later life? the answer, from every corner, came back: ‘Yes’.

And now she’s back to ruin my 30s with what I suspect will be a blastedhellscape vision of one’s 40s (apparently she’s 51 as the book opens, but there are flashbacks to at least five years before) that will finally force me to build that bunker I have been planning for the last 15 years and clang the steel-banded door shut behind me.

The books were, I know, meant to be a bit of fun, maybe even a light satire on our unfortunate masochistic tendencies as a gender, a bit like harry enfield originally intended Loadsamoney (google it, younger readers. We’ll wait) to be a satire on the eighties greed-is-good philosophy instead of the hero he became.

The problem was that the story had just enough truth in it and not quite enough exaggeration to stop people reading it straight. I looked around with fear-filled eyes, feeling my ovaries tighten with tension at the nods of recognition and the unquestioning public embrace of Bridget as the acceptable face of slightly older womanhood.

Lucy Mangan: "Bridget doesn’t speak for us all"