"A LOT happens at 50, the best thing being that you just don't care anymore. At 40, you still care. At 30, you care way too much and your 20s are quite frankly a nightmare. Bring on 60, I say: just imagine the joy of having grandchildren!"

This is an irrepressible quote from an interview conducted by Celia Walden with the famous Texan Jerry Hall, once wed to Mick Jagger. (I have always loved Jerry. Why, she grew up in Gonzales, Texas, a little town of 5,000 people, just 60 miles from San Antonio. It was Gonzales that sent most of its men to die in the Alamo.) My parents are both buried there. So, Jerry and I have always been pals and have quite a connection. This gal has come a long way from Gonzales!)

Jerry's four children, ages 12 through 25, are all by Mick Jagger, so she remains entangled in the rock star's peripatetic life. But now she has put the brakes on her rumored "explosive" memoir. Is this because she doesn't want to dish her famed ex or is it because she just doesn't have time to finish it?

Jerry has completed an Open University course in Humanities and the Enlightenment and she has been playing in the West End's version of "Calendar Girls."

HERE ARE some Jerry Hall-isms, from a girl who was first discovered, at age 16, wearing a bikini on the beach at St. Tropez.

"I still like myself. That's why it's important to have interests -- then you don't get sucked into this culture of obsessing about yourself."

"I don't actually think ... people are mean. (About photos showing physical inadequacies.) I think it's a bit of entertainment, and if it makes people feel better that I've got cellulite and so do they, why should I take it personally?"

"I'm not going to be pushed into messing about with myself (surgically). But the sad thing is that Hollywood and TV are very ageist. Once you get older, they can't wait to get rid of you, so a lot of women feel they have to have things done to keep working and I think that's a big mistake. It looks awful. ... There's a lot of pressure in the fashion industry, too."

"My love of literature goes back to my childhood ... I was obsessed with the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay. I was quite nerdy at school."

"It could have been a disaster (speaking of when she ran away to France as a teenager) But I was incredibly lucky. Before long, I'd met Helmut Newton, done the cover of French Vogue, and my career was made."

These days, Jerry has become an ambassador for the Sony digital reader. "It doesn't always pay for women to show up that side. People don't like it. But I find strength through poetry. ... There's also nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it."

Does fame corrupt men more than women? This is the question Celia Walden asked Jerry Hall.

The reporter was referring to Mick Jagger's bandmate, Ronnie Wood, who left his wife for a 21-year-old girl. Here's Jerry: "There is no way a woman would ever leave her family for a teenager like that. It's about a fear of dying for men: they want to stay immortal ... it's just that women are deeply rooted in reality."

Jerry says she and Mick speak several times a week "...and he is a very hands-on dad." Asked if she still loves him, she says, "Yes." Asked if he will turn out to be the love of her life, Jerry says, "God, I hope not!"

IDEAS ABOUT how to fight off the Swine Flu keep flooding in and all of them aren't about continuously washing your hands. Here's one that seems nonsensical but I liked it.

Place a peeled onion in a bowl and put several of these around your house or at your desk or wherever. Many say they did this in the past and never got the flu. The theory is the onion absorbs bacteria.

I'd still keep the hand sanitizer nearby and wash my hands a lot!

And here's the other thing about hand sanitizers.

Does their emergency use excuse using them in public? Is it an offense to good behavior? I was at a lunch recently and someone passed a sanitizer around. Several at the table violently objected that this was rude, crude and unattractive. The smell offended eaters and others just found it "gross."

What do you think? What does Miss Manners think?

BELIEVE IT or not, but statistics seem to show that couples now last an average of 12 years together, which is longer than the venerable traditional "seven-year-itch."

The author of "The Marriage Delusion," one Michael Buchanan writes: "In previous centuries people would get married early, have children and then be parted by death, usually within a decade or two. Nowadays they can expect to live for four or five decades after marriage.

"It is unrealistic to expect most people to sustain love and interest in each other for such long periods, especially if their children have grown up and moved out."

Whether this is true or not, I was accosted the other eve at a charity event when a man came up, shoved his card at me and wanted me to write about and participate in his craze, which was saving marriages no matter what. (I forget the actual name of this so-called charity.)

I handed his card back and told him I wasn't sure "saving marriages" was in anybody's best interest and it really only concerns the two people involved. I also detested the fact that he wanted to make single mothers the villains in his crusade.

I happen to know a lot of perfectly fabulous single mothers. I want to celebrate them, not attack them.

(E-mail Liz Smith at MES3838@aol.com, or write to her c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.)