Age and how to show it 

You look down one day and find your arms and hands are peppered with age-spots;
Thea Astley called these the “mildew of time”. The next day you find them on your face. Your fervent hope is that they may eventually join up and give you an all-over tan.

You have your hair cut short to avoid looking like a geriatric Shirley Temple but instead you look like a parrot when you wake up. And annoyingly your hair, which was supposed to be crisply white by now, is pepper-and-salt-ish with only a few white swooshes.

Putting lipstick on your now lop-sided lips takes great precision to avoid looking like a clown, not helped by what I believe are called “smoker’s lines” above the top lip.

As Germaine Greer once said, you know you’re getting old when your hair migrates from your legs to your chin. Facial hair is the hidden secret of ageing.

Then there's your neck: tortoise wrinkles and a turkey gobbler dewlap. Your upper arms wobble underneath and your torso is blubbery. Your legs are covered in varicose and spider veins and your feet swell.

You need glasses for living not just for reading, your hearing is slowly failing, your teeth are disappearing so you already wear a small denture. You have regularly appearing aches and pains and you see your doctors more often than you do your best friends.

There's really not much about getting old that's appealing unless it's a certain feeling of empowerment.

You can get away with not knowing people's names by calling everyone darling.

You can have your nails painted with electric blue varnish and not care if other people who still use the word varnish keep theirs pale.

You can contemplate having a bracelet tattoo (but probably never have it done because it apparently hurts) but in my case you brave another hurt and have your ears pierced for the first time at 72.

Where once you wouldn't leave the house without face-make-up, eye-make-up, lipstick, earrings, perfume, stockings, heels, you've now got it down to lipstick, earings and occasionally perfume.

You know that you will probably come out on top in any conversation with, say, the police, the local council or the grand-children's school's administration, because you can flex your very authoritative voice to get you there.

And a corollary: you can exercise your considerable charm on wait-persons, shop assistants and the like to leave positive feelings behind like the waft of perfume as an elegant woman walks by.

You may, in fact, be that elegant woman because now you dress down but do it well. You cover the wobbly arms and the pudgy midriff, you distract from the age-spotted hands by delicious nail colour and you find a very good hairdresser.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Princess Anne on pregnancy: “It’s a very boring time. I’m not particularly maternal – it’s an occupational hazard of being a wife.”

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