There was Spain's new Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, surrounded by his new cabinet, containing nine - yes NINE - women vaunting various degrees of glamour but still within the spectrum of ordinary woman.

Then there was Silvio Berlusconi, freshly tonsured and back at the helm in Italy in his eighth decade, and appointing a thirty-something former page 3 equivalent to a key ministery.

Then look at the so-called Blair Babes, now in their 11th year in power and still looking as though they regard a pair of plum coloured BhS nylon trousers as the acme of chic.

OK. I admit it is surely unfair to set our political women aside the femme fatales of euro politique.

But somehow the oppressed, under-dressed, under-juiced woman politician in the country seems to epitomise just how badly we manage to get things wrong - even when we are trying to get them right.

The contrast between the Junoesque Continentals who looked as though they were just poised for top level discussions over cocktails could not have been stronger with the appearance of our harassed front benchers who just about limped into the newsnight studio after a quick interchange in the Commons, putting the kids to bed and gulping down a bite of whatever passed muster for supper.

But, at least Hazel Blears et al are still standing in the court of women's democratic representation.

This is more than we can say for our top lawfirms whose almost total lack of diversity at senior levels is now threatening to hit them where it hurts. Some of the big US investment banks - and, OK, I accept this may be happening only because they have very little else to do at this stage of the credit crunch - are challenging the top legal partnerships. If Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan are under pressure on the issue of diversity from their own shareholders, they can gain brownie points by smartening up their own service pipeline.

Yet a FTSE100 senior non-executive director and a former chief executive last week told me he thought there would be no way on earth that any married woman, let-alone a working mother, would be able to hold her own at the top of a commercial legal firm.
If a deal's got to be done, he said, then it has to be done and that usually means working 24 hours a day propped up by fistfuls of Pro-Plus.

This is, of course, extreme. And often - rather in the way doctors used to pride themselves on illegible handwriting - it rather suits senior men to claim the hours and conditions are too hostile and cannot be mastered by any but the butchest of women.

But even top women managers let down their sisters by failing to have children. Unsurprisingly less than half of senior women in business have children.

Yet more than 95 per cent of men in a similar rank have children.

I think this says less about women's ability and more about their failure to have a wife. The issue for working mothers is not wholly one of childcare. Yes, a lovely nanny or grandparent certainly helps ring fence the little darlings during office hours.

But there is so very much more that is needed to keep a household - and its working mum - on track. Who deals with the local council when they've delivered the wrong wheelie bin? Who takes the rabbit to the vet within working hours to avoid the emergency call out rate? Who organises the kid’s visits to the dentist, the doctor, the optician - none of whom is available to anyone who does more than the odd couple of hours in Tesco Express.

Hedge Funds provide all these 'running a house' type back ups. But these are extras for mega-earners only.

More ordinary men are still fortunate enough to have a full time wife and mother.

For most working mums, however, it will remain a struggle and juggle even to look and feel as good as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith after a run in with Gordon Brown rather than a Euro-style goddess.

To mis-quote Bob Dylan: There's a new day at dawn and I've finally arrived. I'm there in the morning so you'll know I've survived. I can't believe it, I can't believe I'm alive..... '

Yes I have actually had Anton's pins stuck in my face - and various other spots - three times. As I sit writing this I do not have Boris Karlov style bandages wrapped around my head to cover his handiwork. My facial muscles are not paralysed into a rictus resembling Gordon Brown trying to look at ease in a particularly gruelling House of Commons session. I am not - as far as I'm aware - suffering any sort of permanent scarring.

Sadly, too many people still recognise me thereby undermining the total restorative claims for facial acupuncture.Disconcertingly, though, Anton seems to take knocking a few years off my appearance as only part of his mission - as if lifting the well worn face of a fifty-something isn't quite enough of a challenge.

My sketchily completed health questionnaire quickly becomes his focal point. He reckons that having been an inveterate smoker for so long has made me hot inside (not as sexy as it sounds and also overlooking the real reason I'm in his Harley Street consulting room - the dreadful lines around my mouth from years of drawing on forty a day).

Anton, who now treats people for everything from depression and infertility to backaches and digestive disorders in addition to those like me seeking to push back the clock, reckons it's my internal heat that has contributed to the fact that I suffer from the horrid, itchy skin disease psoriasis.

He gives me some explanation about depressed blood vessels and wind whistling through the vacant spaces left by their compression that can lead to itchiness. Anton is the product of a Caribbean father, an English mother and a Canadian upbringing, which is clearly pretty racy put together with all this Chinese-type medicinal thinking.

What with this and the fact that I don't sleep well clearly gives Anton a lot more than my face to go for with his needles. I was not looking forward to my incipient role as pin cushion - even though I'd been assured me that dull ache was the target rather than outright pain.

Unbelievably he was right. In went the pins to my feet, arms and neck. And then all over my face. Tackling the lines around my lips the pins went right through to my mouth. My tongue could feel the point. But my face couldn't feel a thing.

Even Anton's 'secret weapon' an electric pulse he attaches to four special gold needles that take your cheek muscles on the equivalent of a cross country run becomes strangely relaxing.

What at first makes you feel like a rabbit having whiskers tweaked becomes rather hypnotic, and the after-glow is almost exhilerating. My sacrifice on your behalf has involved only being photographed with the needles in.

Strangely, it will feel rather a loss to stop popping to Anton's studio. If nothing else, an hour's forced doing nothing is no bad thing for any working mother- particularly if the guilt is removed by feeling it's somehow to do with work. And, though I am clearly no Peter Pan, my face is feeling wonderfully refreshed.

Only when one of my colleagues drew attention to the promotional shots for a horror movie did it begin to dawn that I may be about to do something very stupid indeed. Even by my own illustrious standards.

'You'll look like this,' he said, brandishing the advert featuring Pinhead in Clive Barker's notorious seventies epic of guesomeness, Hellraiser. Then I started to have second thoughts......heartstopping second thoughts.

And if you don't ever get to read the second part of this blog you'll know how right those very deep-seated reservations turned out to be. Because I've agreed to be a guinea pig in what is suddenly feeling like one of those clinical trials that everyone other than the participants realises is doomed to disaster.

I am testing out what blithely calls itself a non-surgical face lift. But, as you'll realise if you're a Hellraiser afficionado, there's non-surgical and there's having loads of pins stuck in your face.

Believe it or not, we are about to offer a discount on this treatment to readers of FMWF.com and I'm wondering whether I should start dusting down our liability policy.

My husband reckons the only reason I may emerge from this ordeal looking younger than on my way in is because I'll have a face full of holes which may encourage the recollection of an acne-ridden teenager.

However, when I mentioned my upcoming ordeal to a couple of members of the Financial Mail Women's Forum they swooned and told me how fantastically invigorated their faces had felt after being punctured all over.

And, on the phone ahead of our first meeting the impressively-styled Anton Micheal Rooke, a Canadian graduate of Chinese medicine whose AcuLift clinic hangs out in Harley Street, is quick to reassure me nothing terribly serious can go wrong.

Absolutely no chance, he chirps, that I'll look as though I've got advanced Bell's Palsy after session number one. So long as I'm not allergic to having gold needles plugged into every available wrinkle, I'll be fine, he says.

I'm beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't back down from this attempt to look young and gorgeous like I've shied away from other 'treatments' like skin peels, surgery or simple Botox injections. In addition to not wanting to cough up thousands, cowardice has always meant I've swerved away from the operating table.

I mean, just how embarrassing would it be to die under anaesthetic having the bags under your eyes done. No question of tears as the coffin trundles into the flames then. Just a snigger that the vain old bag clearly deserved what she got.

So, I'm off to Anton who I hope will not kill me. Even if he turns back only days rather than decades I shall be pleased.

But, how poignant to discover that a young, gorgeous colleague is heading off at the same time for another type of 'non-surgical' face lift. Well, at least Anton has a rather more obvious task at hand

How fantastic to be able to end 2007 on a high note. Financial Mail Women's Forum is teaming up with St Albans' Girls School and the City of London School for Girls to stage a second Breaking the Mould conference aimed at broadening the career horizons of young women.

We intend to host this event at the fantastically beautiful Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In addition we hope to be able to offer our headteacher guests (across the private and state sectors) and our sponsors an exclusive soiree the evening before in the River Room of the House of Lords. We are hoping that about 250 headteachers will attend and we've got our fingers crossed that we are lucky in the ballot for a reception in the main Palace of Westminster.

I know it all sounds too glitzy and glamourous for words, but there is a deadly serious intent: to try to inject some imagination, excitement and verve into careers advice at school and to raise the aspirations of young women heading for university and into the workplace.

One of the reasons I went to university was because, after flirting for a year or so with the idea of teaching French, I realised didn't have a clue what I might like to do. My school was highly academic - the names of its most conspicuous achievers were stentoriously carved in wood around the assembly hall. Yet careers advice was there none. We were given a couple of sheets of A4 with pathetically inaccurate details of the qualifications needed for certain callings. It was years after I left, for example, that I realised the City of London was anything other than a geographical territory.

Now, as readers of my blog will undoubtedly be saying to themselves, that was, of course, a VERY long time ago.

But a depressing number of surveys suggests that girls still tend to restrict their ambitions to the obvious professions such as nursing, teaching or the law while, anecdotally, there also seems to be a bit of a grass roots rebellion against working mothers by a number of teenagers who declare simply their intent to marry - rather than become - a millionaire.

The idea behind our first Breaking The Mould conference, held in 2005, and the one we plan for March is to put inspirational women in front of headteachers who will in turn be enthused and encouraged to up the game in their own educational establishments.

This time we intend to go even further - we plan a webcam of the event which will be available on FMWF.com and will be there for students throughout the country to see. The 'techies' on my team say we'll even put something on Youtube.

Themes will include entrepreneurship, the police and armed services, charity management, financial services and politics.

We are hoping to work with our partner schools to conduct research among their pupils. But I would love to hear from other schools who might like to participate in such a study.