What better way to deal with the empty-nest stage of life than to do as Gwyneth Paltrow has done, and move house? Having sold her £18 million family home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, she and her husband are moving to what in LA terms counts as their country house in Montecito. OK, not everyone is going to have a bigger place to play with, like Gwyneth, but many parents feel like chucking the cards in the air and watch them come down in a different pattern when their children leave home.

Several people I know have sold up in town and decided to base themselves among the fields and babbling brooks with their dogs. It's a nice idea. But guess what? Those grown-up kids who made us feel miserable as we helped to haul all their belongings out of the house for a new life have an uncanny habit of moving back in. The idea of children actually leaving the nest, rather than having a quick flutter outside and returning, is truly only for the birds.

Ask any middle-class parent of twentysomethings whether the end of university and, hopefully, the start of first jobs means they will have no need of their old bed, and you will be met with a Gen Z-style eye-roll – but from the parents. My own 29-year-old is currently living (or should I say staying) with us. Each time he moves out, I look at the room which was his childhood bedroom with a sense of nostalgia mixed with excitement about what I might do next with it.

And then, before I have resolved that issue, he's back. It's a treat to have your adult child around the place and certainly the conversations are more interesting than the monosyllabic grunts of the teenage years. But some parent/child behaviours are preserved in aspic, and not always in a good way. Gwyneth Paltrow has sold her £18 million family home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. Pictured: Paltrow's LA home that she put up for sale for $29.99 million.

Those who invest in a new home and a new life often get a nasty shock when they find the spare room they've designated as a home office or – what bliss! – a dressing room, suddenly has to turn into their adult child's bedroom, again. Not that I imagine Gwyneth Paltrow will be having to contend with a space problem when her children, Apple and Moses, boomerang back. Continuing this subject: can we talk about how different generations regard food hygiene?.

When I poke around my 97-year-old mother's fridge, I am appalled by some of what I find. There's cheese that could march on Moscow, lettuce that redefines the term limp, jars of sauce with crust that could serve as a lid. But any attempt of mine to throw the stuff out is met with a stiff refusal and the comment: 'It's perfectly fine if you just cut the rind/skin off.'. As a child, I remember onions would be kept until they had trees growing out them and potatoes were studded with sprouting growths like acne. But, amazingly, my son considers that my own behaviour verges on being equally unsafe.

A packet of feta left just slightly open, with the outer edges going a bit yellow, is unacceptable. A cucumber that hasn't been resealed in clingfilm is deemed unusable. If the open pesto jar is a week old, it's for the bin. When I poke around my 97-year-old mother's fridge, I am appalled by some of what I find, writes Alexandra Shulman. Some friends of mine have a house with an old fridge full of so many odds and ends of food that their adult children were desperate to club together to buy them a new one – just so it would be emptied of what they regarded as toxic matter.

If it goes on like this, each generation being fussier about food hygiene than the next, our great-grandchildren, will be brought up on the kind of rehydratable food used by astronauts to survive in space. No possibility of germs lurking there. Last week, I was sent to review a magnificent Swiss health spa. There I was, swaddled in a soft white dressing gown, with nothing to do but be looked after. But every therapist – from the facialist to the nutritionist to the medical doctor to the masseur – looked at me in a concerned way and told me I needed to relax.

Who has ever found being told to relax anything other than extremely irritating and immensely stressful? We are constantly bombarded with the importance of relaxing and ways to do it – mindfulness, yoga, sound baths, alternate nostril breathing. All designed to transport us to this supposed Nirvana of relaxation. Last week, I was sent to review a magnificent Swiss health spa. There I was, swaddled in a soft white dressing gown, with nothing to do but be looked after (stock photo).

But what does being relaxed mean anyway? And, really, what's the point? Who ever won the war by relaxing?. Big hair is back, but it's got nothing to do with the return of Donald Trump, despite what some fashion commentators say. Sitting in the hairdressers over recent months, I was transfixed by the sight of young women having their long hair, for years kept poker-straight, wrapped in curlers and emerging with hairstyles that make Dolly Parton's wigs look as flat as Norfolk. Less Republican, more country music style, à la Miley Cyrus. How long until Dyson comes up with a set of heated rollers?.