You don't need Nintendo to keep your marbles. Try reading, take up darts or tinkle away at the piano

A grand squabble has broken out over how to improve one's brain.

Nintendo believes that its Big Brain Academy, Brain Training and More Brain Training, developed by the revered Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, can improve "practical intelligence" and save elderly people from losing their marbles. But cognitive psychology professor Alain Lieury, at the University of Rennes, Brittany, thinks Kawashima a "dream merchant", and that one can keep the brain going just as well by sticking to corny old methods such as reading a book, using a pencil and paper, and helping one's kids with their homework.

I'm with Lieury here. Why spend £100 on a console and £15 over and over again on various games, when one can stick to free library books and modestly priced pencils? Better still, why not play a musical instrument? A recorder. A guitar. Join an orchestra. That gets the brain going. Playing music has you making more mental decisions more rapidly than nearly any other activity, and it sounds better than poking and tapping away at a little blipping machine. I don't want to show off here - well perhaps I do - but I've been practising the piano like mad for the last few months and have cleverly learned one and a half Scarlatti sonatas by heart. I haven't tried to memorise anything for 40 years, and now I find I can still do it, and my brain is clearly working like greased clockwork.

Of course, Scarlatti isn't everyone's cup of tea. Rosemary's learning Spanish and French, and Fielding sticks to football tactics and systems. "When do you play 4-4-2? Or when do you play 4-5-1? Or you can go 3-4-1-2. It exercises my brain," he says. He's also tried dance lessons and counting his steps, reads long newspaper articles and thrillers and eats fish. Someone he knows visited the Portobello Road and tried a head orgasm, a sort of brain-improving treatment that involves wearing a wire basket, but he wouldn't recommend it, so he may try darts instead, with all that adding-up and taking-away backwards.

But does he really need to drive himself mad? Do any of us? Are all these grisly predictions about elderly persons doddering around, dribbling, with a blank gaze and a sponge-brain just a ploy to make us buy Nintendos?

I suspect so, because I once heard that the mind does not necessarily degenerate. It just changes method.

Its knowledge becomes crystallised rather than fluid. It may grow less flexible, but as the years go by it builds up an enormous stock of information which, mixed with experience, becomes wisdom. Providing, of course, that one uses and exercises it fairly regularly and does not sit blobbing in front of the telly, alone and silent, gawping at rubbish, which Lieury sensibly warns us against. And why all this fuss about "rejuvenating"? What is so marvellous about a young brain? It knows relatively zilch. If the world was fair, the young would be kneeling at our feet, admiring our wrinkles and wealth of knowledge and absorbing enlightenment.

So can I advise everyone to stop panicking? Don't worry if you start forgetting things. It probably means you have too much on your mind. You will most probably retain your marbles until the very end. Whether your brain rots or not is mainly down to luck, not Nintendo.

It's bash the elderly week again, as usual. Older women have been dressing oddly. First we had Madonna in bandages, now we've got Joan Collins all over Hello! in a rather extraordinary get-up, with a sort of animal-melange theme. "Hardly conventional for a pensioner," blabbers the Daily Mail.

Oh so what? I love the butterfly-bird-snake-floral head-dress, because it is so wild, and the pose, on a velvet-draped sofa and mountains of cushions, although I don't go a bomb on the cream trousers, because they are so "conventional", and I think the orangey blouse is a ghastly shape, but I would defend to the death darling Joan's right to wear them. Grand fashion designers can send their stick models down the catwalk in surgical boots, neck braces, mad flounces, shapes and swathes, and persons who ought to know better will sit through fashion weeks and observe admiringly as if they aren't watching something stark-staring barmy; youth can swagger about in hanging-down trousers and no one dare laugh or criticise, but should a woman over 50 start draping herself in nonsense of her own free will, then everyone feels free to sneer.

And what is a "conventional pensioner" meant to wear? I needn't say. You all know. Mainly maroon, or navy, or beige, like the Queen in her Christmas Day message. And they can wear tracksuit bottoms with elasticated waists and ankles, which are a sure sign that your sex life is no more, or those fold-up plastic rain hats over their grey-cauliflower hair, and of course cardigans, but then none of that matters, when one is a "pensioner".

What does being a pensioner mean anyway? Anyone from around 60 to 100 or more. That's people with up to 40 years between them, all lumped together and expected to look the same. No one would expect a five-year-old and a 45-year-old to wear the same frock.

So no more references to La Collins being a "pensioner" please. She is just a good-looking woman with a flamboyant wardrobe.

This week Michele is reading Starstruck, by Cosmo Landesman: "I always knew there were Landesmans about, from the 60s onwards, but what did they do, exactly? They embarrassed their son. Give him a medal for surviving, and for this moving memoir." She watched Casualty with Rosemary and they ate baked potatoes, which they do every Saturday, for their special treat: "Wild."