Rolling Stones ex is a curse and intimidating to men

“I don’t get asked out nearly as much as I’d like,” complains Jo Wood, screwing up her features into a mock pout. “Honestly, nobody ever asks me out.” Oh dear. Didn’t she get the memo? We’re supposed to be asking men out now. For the first time in our 40-minute conversation the 60 year-old former model sits completely still. The laughter has stopped along with the wild gesticulation and the silly faces. Somehow I’ve managed to shock a woman who in the course of her 30-year marriage to hell-raising Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood once got so deeply into freebasing crack cocaine that – she wrote in her autobiography – “meringues were banned from the house after Ronnie tried to freebase sugar for the umpteenth time.”

“Seriously?” she whispers, once this new piece of dating etiquette has sunk in. “Well, damn it! I can’t be doing that. They will just have to ask me out. But my girlfriends tell me that men find me intimidating, which I don’t get,” she shrugs. “I’m only me!”

For the record, I don’t get it either. Wood’s Regent’s Park sitting room may be intimidating, with its vast chiaroscuro portraits and glassy-eyed marionettes propped up in corners, but the still girlish-faced blonde sitting on a sofa before me in tiny Prada biker boots with “Up all night” scrawled across her chest is as friendly and easy-going as they come. Which is why, I suggest, when it comes to suitors the intimidating factor might just be that Rolling Stone ex? “Isn’t that awful though? It’s like a curse! After all, before Ronnie I was married, so this is really the first time in my life I’ve been properly single.” Her girlfriend in New York is on Tinder, she tells me. So maybe she should try that? “As long as Tinder isn’t just a shagging thing or only for young people? I promised my sons I’d never go out with anyone younger than them,” she says. Probably a good mantra to live by. “I did once go on Match.com,” she muses, “and I went out with a really nice American guy, but then I get so worried about whether or not to let them know who I used to be married to. This one guy once asked me whether he’d be able to find me on Google and I said ‘maybe’. Later on I got a text saying: ‘OMG. Google overfloweth with Jo!’”

Former rock-chicks who have been to the brink and back tend to have a stoic streak, and you’d never guess from talking to Wood the many sadnesses life has thrown her way. Never mind her 2009 split from Ronnie after 35 years together and two children – Leah, 36, and Tyrone, 30 (she also has a 41-year-old son, Jamie, from her first marriage). Although no doubt heartbreaking at the time, any animosity seems to have come out in the wash, with Wood now “as happy as she’s ever been” and Ronnie married to theatre producer Sally Humphreys. In the past year alone, however, Wood has lost her mother (“a few weeks ago, which was very sad but it was her time”) and been helping her little sister Lize through breast cancer. Which is why when Breast Cancer Care asked her to join Asda’s Tickled Pink campaign to raise awareness and funds for the charity, Wood immediately pledged her support. “When they asked whether I had experienced any breast cancer in my family, I told them my grandmother and mother had had breast cancer (although after a lumpectomy my mother was clear for the rest of her life) and that my sister had had a double mastectomy earlier this year. So it couldn’t be more personal and important to me.”

Growing up in Essex, Wood – the daughter of an architectural model maker and an Avon lady – remembers her grandmother, “who was a very funny lady, just opening her dress and showing us where her breasts used to be. Instead there were just these two scars. I’d never seen anything like it before in my life. I was horrified. Then my mother explained it to us. She said: ‘Granny went to the doctor and when he told her that she had a lump on her breast, she just said, ‘Cut them off. I don’t need them anymore and I don’t have a husband so just take them off’.” Having watched her sister go through the same thing all these years later, Wood is grateful for the advances of science. “Let me tell you that after the reconstruction they look so good. She doesn’t even have to wear a bra - and they won’t age!” she chuckles, “Rotten cow! And it’s so important that women can still feel like women. Because I’m sure that a lot of women feel that having their breasts removed would somehow take away a part of their femininity. Now that no longer has to be the case. But every woman of a certain age does need to go and get herself checked. I still can’t believe that Jackie Collins wouldn’t go for mammograms,” she says sadly, “or that she hadn’t told anyone she had cancer. She thought it would go away, I suppose. And of course it doesn’t.”

With Lize having done the women of the family a massive service by getting tested for the BRCA gene (“and we don’t have it, so thank you, sister”) all Wood feels she can do for her daughter Leah – as well as other women – now is promote the importance of a healthy diet. “I’ve been organic for years, because I really do believe that what you put in your body is so important: it’s like putting good fuel into a racing car.” With eight grandchildren (to whom she proudly tells me she’s known as “cool gran”), Wood needs all the energy she can get. “So I don’t eat fast food or drink fizzy drinks and I hardly have any sugar – you’ve got to remember that cancer loves sugar! I don’t smoke cigarettes or weed. I don’t do any drugs any more but I do like a bit of organic chocolate and a double vodka with soda and lime – the leanest drink you can have.”

Despite the abuse she has put her body through over the years – described in hilarious detail in her 2013 memoir, Hey Jo – Wood cautions against that oh-so-female default emotion: guilt. “I’ve been pretty naughty in my life. And luckily I was saved by getting very ill in 1991, when I found out I had a perforated appendix. That changed everything for me and stopped me from abusing my body such a lot. If it hadn’t happened, who knows if I would still be here today?” Yet she has always refused to feel guilty for any of it, she says. “Because what good would that do? It wouldn’t change anything. I had a fantastic time all those years. At least I think I did – I can’t remember lots of it. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that guilt, regret and anger – holding on to grudges – will do terrible things to you. I went to see somebody after Ronnie and I split up who explained how important it was to forgive. Then I went on holiday to Africa and I just remember standing on the side of a mountain with my arms outstretched and shouting: ‘I forgive! I forgive!’ And I did forgive all sorts of people on that day.”

In terms of regrets, Wood allows herself just one: “I really wish I’d been a better dancer,” she laughs. “I really hoped it would come naturally to me when I did Strictly Come Dancing, but it didn’t.” Her hopes for the future, however, are unlimited. “I want to start working on my organic skincare line again and encouraging people to be more aware of what they’re putting both on and inside their bodies. I’m working on a scrapbook of all the photos I took over the years on tour with the boys. Oh and I would love to get married again. Third time lucky, right? But before that happens, some bloke’s going to have to have the guts to ask me out.”

Jo Wood supports Asda’s Tickled Pink campaign, raising awareness and funding for Breast Cancer Care and Breast Cancer Now. The Tickled Pink range is in store and online on George.com