EVEN if you had never heard of the great, and now sadly, late, American humourist Nora Ephron, you will certainly have heard of her work.

That famous cafe scene in When Harry Met Sally is hers, and so is the movie Heartburn.

Nora’s gone to the great studio in the sky but left us with a wealth of fantastic material and wise advice on how to live a better life.

‘Buy, don’t rent’ was one of her titbits; ‘If the shoe doesn’t fit in the store, it never will,’ was another.

Nora advised us to ‘overtip’, take more pictures and beware of a ‘saggy roll’ that will appear over our waistlines when we hit the age of 55.

It was the kind of sharp, sassy, lifeimproving advice that all women are in need of but generally don’t get.

I never did. Standard beauty advice from my mum was to have my hair cut short to ‘show off your elfin face’. Yes, really. And stop laughing at the back. So that’s why I spent the first years of my teens resembling George from the Famous Five, then.

Standard fashion advice from my granny was to buy an ‘investment’ Jaeger jacket and have a perm – which is why I spent my 20s looking like Roly the Eastenders’ poodle.

Like many a female of my vintage I ploughed through glossy mags during the 1980s, desperately searching for wise words, not on how to get a man and keep a man, but on how to earn more money, understand what not to wear, and how to cope with my fear of flying.

Women are always being given advice on the big stuff, but never about anything which really helps.

It took me until the age of 45 to realise that unless your T-shirt is constructed of five per cent Lycra you are always going to look 10lbs heavier than you really are, and totally flustered, because the wretched garment will bunch up. Same goes for undercrackers.

No one ever tells you that your bra should cost more than your shoes because otherwise you will end up looking fatter and older as everything heads south.

Plucking your eyebrows has nearly as good an effect as a facelift and when you find a pair of jeans that make you feel like a minor goddess you should always buy them in threes, because you will never regret it for the rest of your natural life.

Don’t buy 100 per cent wool carpets unless you want them to become a buffet for every beetle and moth known to humankind, and spend as much as you can afford on your mattress, your shower, your sofa and your office chair because if you’re not in one, you’re on the other.

Value food lines are exactly the same as the normal lines, just in less fancy packaging, and Primark’s opaque tights are as good as any knocked out by other purveyors at four times the price.

Tunics are God’s gift to people with triple-decker stomachs, and giant, American-style washing machines will transform your life.

Houseplants, but especially spider plants, should be avoided because they are to rooms what beige windcheaters are to high-fashion and unless you’re heavily into avian husbandry, keeping chickens is a total nuisance – all that stress when you go away, or if they become ill, for just the six eggs a week.

Men who tell you, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’, are lying, as are those who tell you they can’t get married because they are commitment-phobic.

What they really mean is that they are waiting until someone turns up who is hotter than you.

People only ring back when it’s important to them, and banks are not your friend, they are only in it for the money. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

• GIVEN his sterling performance the other week, duffing up the hapless Treasury minister Chloe Smith, is there any good reason whatsoever that Jeremy Paxman couldn’t be asked to run the urgently-needed inquiry into our banking system?

Not only would we get the drill-down that we need, we could also start to recoup some of the money we’ve been tricked out of.

Well, how much would you pay to watch the sight of these spivs squirming in front of the Grand Inquisitor?