SO Bridget Jones is set to return.

Novelist Helen Fielding has announced that she is to reprise her loveable and bumbling heroine for a third book next year.

Predictably, since the news broke, there have been the expected grumblings: money for old rope, flogging dead horses and similar wearisome analogies. I, for one, can't wait.

When Fielding briefly resurrected her column, in The Independent in 2006, Bridget gave birth to a baby boy,

He was fathered by the roguish Daniel Cleaver, and the dashing Mark Darcy was out of the picture.

Her final column read: "Bridget is giving her every attention to the care of her newborn son – and is too busy to keep up her Diary for the time being."

With Fielding keeping deliberately tight-lipped on the details of the new novel, I can only really speculate.

But the world has changed a lot in the past six years, never mind the almost two decades since Bridget first burst into our lives.

Back then, her evenings were spent anxiously waiting for the phone to ring and obsessively dialling 1471.

One can only imagine what delicious depths her neuroticism has reached, with text messaging and multiple Facebook, Twitter and email accounts to check.

Between daily faux pas with the other yummy mummies at the school gates, I can picture Bridget going to Zumba classes, wearing a Sara Lund-inspired jumper and ditching her 40-a-day Silk Cut habit for a trendy electronic cigarette.

Given that no-one has drunk chardonnay since, well, Bridget did, evenings are more likely spent quaffing a suave New Zealand sauvignon blanc as she watches Strictly Come Dancing with an ear to the baby monitor.

Even poor old Mr Darcy may been usurped by a new-found obsession with Mr Grey, he of Fifty Shades fame. But here's hoping she hasn't dispensed with workaholics, sexaholics, commitment-phobics, peeping Toms, megalomaniacs or emotional idiots entirely.