Last updated 19:28, Thursday, 31 January 2008

I’m not supposed to know she has a tattoo. She, who went up like a nuclear mushroom when her daughter came home from holiday with a fairy on her hip, has come back from Australia with a daisy on her foot.

I’d call her hypocritical but I’m not supposed to know. My information, though from a reliable source, is a secret – a woman’s secret, that is, which as we all know is very specific.

A woman keeps a secret in a different way to any man. He keeps his by saying nothing. She keeps hers by telling everybody, one at a time, making each promise to tell nobody else – because it’s a secret. Soon enough the whole world knows, everyone having been informed personally and individually. Alyson’s daisy secret is one of those. A woman’s.

Jane told me – but I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that to yourself. She said Aly had been the worse for one too many glasses of Aussie Chardonnay at some point over Christmas and had acquired, in Sydney, a double headed daisy close to her little toe. The most painful experience ever, apparently. It hurt so much it sobered her up immediately and eliminated all risk of hangover.

“Every cloud...” I said.

“I know. But a tattoo! She’s 57, for goodness sake! I bet you wouldn’t do it.” said Jane.

“I’m not 57.”

“Don’t tell her I told you.”

I hate secrets. They make me nervous – mainly because I know there’s no such thing. I keep them, when asked and then weeks later feel foolish when they rotate full circle, come back to me as an unrepeatable confidence and make me appear to be the last to know, severely ill-informed and stupid.

Aly told me a secret too – though I’ve asked her umpteen times not to. She and Liz, our friend from Radio Leeds, had been having a long lunch together (they do a lot of that there) and Liz had passed confidential comment on me.

“I don’t think she’ll ever leave Cumbria now,” she’d said.

“I don’t think she’ll ever leave Brampton,”Aly had added – going one better. “She’s far too fond of that tarn, the butcher and the beer.”

I’ve no idea why that exchange should have been a secret – unless bets had been placed at William Hill’s. But it being a woman’s secret it didn’t count anyway, so I let it go.

The tattoo is something different, though. I simply can’t keep that to myself. Impossible. There are things Aly needs to explain.

An utterly and enviably sensible woman – apart from when her eye is taken by animal print shoes with red bows on top – Aly has been a bit of a role model for me. She’s weathered bad times, celebrated good, had two entirely different successful careers and is about to embark on a third. She has brought up her delightful daughter alone from birth and she’s a vegetarian (but nobody’s perfect).

All in all she’s everything a strong, independent, free-thinking woman should be – loads of fun, kind, loyal, inspirational, dependable, she mixes a great gin and tonic, everybody loves her and she hates tattoos.

So what happened? Is there a 57 point at which we suddenly need to signal our right to act completely out of character, thus creating secrets over which our friends – who thought they knew us well – will gossip in unnecessary outrage? I do hope so. I could quite fancy that.

“You left Yorkshire,” Jane said. But she doesn’t get it. She likes to stay in character. And Leeds.

Aly must have hit that 57 point because she was actually 56 when she hit the roof over her daughter’s “deliberate disfigurement” last summer. Ballistic isn’t a description that goes anywhere close to her reaction to that tiny fairy on a trim, 19-year-old hip.

“You think it’s clever and cool now,” she’d stormed. “But just you wait until you’re 80. How trendy and pretty is a crumpled fairy on your crepey skin going to look then? How much are you going to wish you’d never done it after drinking too much on a silly holiday night out?”

I can’t keep the secret – just can’t. Since I was the one who’d wondered out loud whether she might have been a touch harsh – and how many 80-year-old hips are scrutinised closely enough for a fairy to be found – I have to tell her I know about her tattoo because she’s going to need to inform me when the inevitable retaliatory reply is expected.

“You’ll be 80 before I am, Mum. You’ll have to let me know how it feels.”

I want to be there – for the moral support only a best friend can offer, of course. And to keep the secret.