this will become a regular news feature

Before getting into Ronnie Wood’s latest drinking binge with the lapdancer from Moscow, let’s start with something sobering.

Transitions Online has a really interesting piece about Russia’s sex starved Babushkas. ‘Women over 40 have a slim chance of getting married. At over 60 it’s almost impossible‘, says Dilya Yenikeyeva, co-chairwoman of the Russian Association of Sexologists.

The low life-expectancy of Russian males is only part of the problem. Some women are apparently just too picky in a market where they should probably take what they can get.

An older Telegraph article bears this out. ‘Take 100 Russian women, and 90 will be beautiful’, says Oksana Grussova, who spent 15 years hunting rich men, and was eventually married to a wealthy construction magnate. ‘But take 100 Russian men, and ten of them will be gay, 30 alcoholics, 10 drug addicts, 20 impotent, leaving a paltry 30 men.’ Obviously, these 30 have to be shared around all age groups where older girls are at a disadvantage.

Maybe these Babushkas should attend one of Moscow’s flourishing Bitchology classes. Certainly their main competition is from young girls snagging the older men with money.

In this context, today’s ‘Times’ has a fairly sickening society piece on Dasha Zhukova, 26, the new girlfriend of billionaire Roman Abramovich, 40.

The ‘Times’ is at some pains to point out that Dasha is not an airhead and runs an important company that produces PVC leggings, while her mother was once a molecular biologist. Convinced? Neither am I.

The age gap is even wider between Ekaterina Ivanova, 19, and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, 61. Since Ronnie is reputed to down two bottles of vodka a day, one can see how he was naturally drawn towards a Russian companion.

Ronnie is another oldie who has been unfairly removed from the dating age window of many Babushkas. But here their pickiness might well be rewarded. It’s unlikely old Soviet women could keep up. Phil Kaufman, the Stones first US road manager, observed in his book (a great read, by the way) that the group could easily consume the entire drugs output of a small South American town while on tour.