BABY boomers have a champion in Presteigne’s resident author Deborah Moggach whose characters of more mature years get to embrace life – and frequently one another – in adventures that demonstrate it’s OK to have romance and wrinkles at the same time.

Those of a certain age will thrill to her message in Heartbreak Hotel, a book inspired by the writer’s home town of the past few years: (for Knockton read Presteigne).

It’s here that a run-down, rambling B&B, opened by an ageing, much married Thespian, welcomes in the tired and disillusioned with his ‘courses for divorces’, who invariably rediscover the magic of love.

This theme earned huge admiration with the box office hit, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a film based on Deborah’s book, These Foolish Things in which a mixed bunch of pensioners opt to receive care in their advancing years in India. Thus Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton et al cheerfully signed up.

“At this stage of their careers, what could be more hootish than India in November with all your friends?” asked the writer.

Deborah got to visit the Rajasthan film set on the back of a motorbike with her husband, journalist Mark Williams, who was editor of the Brecon & Radnor Express in the 1990s.

She was moved by the hugs from so many thanking her for creating the original story.

“Everyone forgets that someone must have had the idea for it,” she says. “They told me they wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for my lovely book!

“It shows how an older woman can nab Bill Nighy – what could be more heavenly than that?”

Warm and entertaining, she has discussed life, love and other eyebrow-raising capers to a packed village hall at Huntington, the author’s talk bringing to a close the Friends of St Thomas a Becket Church’s 2017 season of fundraisers.

With a peppering of expletives, and some saucy tales, she kept her audience enthralled, demonstrating that it’s all right for oldies to have fun.

“We are still the same, just a bit more wrinkly!” she explains.

At the other end of the scale, she feels for the younger generation held back by pensioners eager to hold on to jobs and spend their money with gay abandon.

“We are not like old people used to be,” she says. “There are those in their 70s and 80s elephant tracking in Nepal, eating away into their grandchildren’s inheritance, refusing to die.”

Strategically placed marksmen at National Trust properties might provide a useful solution, she suggests lightly.

Her writing career began when she lived in Pakistan with ‘Mr Moggach’.

She says: “It’s very liberating living in a foreign country.” Later, living back in London with her two children, she had a long-term relationship with her ‘sweetheart’, the cartoonist Mel Calman.

They were watching a film in Leicester Square when he tragically had a heart attack and died.

That was a bitter blow for her, but eventually she learned to love again.

Seven years ago, she met Mark and four years later they married at the Judge’s Lodging in Presteigne.

“We forgot the cake, so I was running up and down the street asking if someone could bake one for us!” In the end, a cardboard creation was produced. “The wedding was such a hoot!” says Deborah who admits to being “as happy as Larry” living in Presteigne.

She misses her “darling” grandchildren, and hops on the train to London when she can.

Right now, she is working on a screenplay commissioned by the BBC about the Second World War veteran who absconded from his Hove care home, and sneaked on a coach bound for Normandy in order to have one last reunion with old comrades.

Her screenplay for the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley was nominated for a BAFTA.

This month it’s anticipated that the film based on Deborah’s acclaimed book, Tulip Fever, will be released in the UK. The story of a love affair between a rich merchant’s young wife and an artist commissioned to paint her portrait was inspired by a work from the time of Vermeer.

Her book captivated Stephen Spielberg who summoned Deborah over to the US for a meeting. Production plans were drawn up, but then the global financial crisis struck in 2008 and the project was destroyed overnight.

Now the story has been adapted for screen under Hollywood super-producer Harvey Weinstein’s capable stewardship, and a release date is expected any day.

During filming, Deborah got her wish when she visited the set. “I did what I wanted to do 20 years ago, to walk into a Dutch painting.”

Nosey by nature, her inspirations can come from overheard conversations, such as a woman declaring: “I wouldn’t fancy going to bed with someone who hasn’t heard of Cliff Michelmore!”

This is the stuff of Deborah’s brilliant Heartbreak Hotel, an imaginary B&B set in one of Presteigne’s Georgian houses.

Her characters, most of them fairly long in the tooth, have been bruised and battered by love, but here in Buffy’s establishment with its leaky roof and dodgy plumbing, love can, and does, bloom.

Deborah is head over heels in love with love and her new home.

“I married someone who didn’t mind me being an older woman, after all he’s fairly wrinkly himself,” she says.

There was a succession of awful internet dates before she met her soulmate.

One of them carefully removed his dentures before tucking into a candlelit dinner, another took her to a café that prided itself on ‘eat as much as you like for £4.99’.

“Mark and I come from the same world,” she explains. “Love brought me here.”

If Heartbreak Hotel is adapted for film or TV, who does she envisage playing the endearing Buffy? “I think it might be the inestimable Roger Allam,” she says.

Watch this space….