Gravity Sucks

by Alderson, Maggie

  All I can say to fourteen-year-olds – and their bewildered parents – is that it will change. Think of this as the chrysalis stage of their development, from which they will emerge as beautiful butterflies.

  If only we could spend those years in an actual chrysalis, it would be so much easier for everybody.

  Ageing disgracefully

  I was sitting in the hairdresser the other day when I became fixated on the woman next to me. What first attracted my attention were her toenails: resplendent in paper pedicure slippers, they were painted a gleaming metallic peacock-blue.

  While attempting to maintain a level of discretion, I looked up to where the manicurist was still at work and saw she was having the same colour applied to her fingernails. That in itself was not particularly amazing – I remember wearing that zippy shade myself in the mid-1990s – but it was a little more surprising on a woman of seventy-plus.

  Especially with the rest of her look.

  Beneath the hairdressing cape I could see only her pants – and that was enough. They were zebra print with a bold tropical flower overpattern. Not what you could call subtle; in fact, they were probably Roberto Cavalli.

  The hair the stylist was at work on – with very large rollers and ozone layer-threatening amounts of spray – was bright white Debbie Harry blonde. Verticality seemed to be what they were aiming for. Her skin, in contrast to the barnet, was a quite bright orange; she hadn’t stinted with the make-up trowel and she was wearing plenty of bullion on both alligator-skin hands.

  I confess my first reaction was: Eek! What is it? Someone get the bug spray!

  My next thought was: Aha! She must be someone famously colourful to get about like that. Phyllis Diller perhaps, or Zandra Rhodes, but a quick neck jerk, as if glancing casually at the salon door, effected a good look at her head and it wasn’t one I knew. She was just a ghastly, garish old trout.

  But then, as I continued to check her out while pretending to read my paper, at some risk of developing a permanent strabismus, I had a revelation. She wasn’t trouty at all. She was fabulous. And what a nasty little prejudice that was to sit with (although more comfortable than trying to look sideways without moving one’s head).

  I couldn’t believe I had entertained it even for a moment – the notion that older women ‘shouldn’t’ wear bright blue toenail polish, tropical pants, violently coral lipstick and vertical bombshell hair. Did I mention the toe ring?

  What utter nonsense that imposed stricture of ‘age-appropriate’ appearance is, because even from my slitty-eyed, surreptitious viewpoint, it was quite clear that far from being some tragic, superannuated bimbo, Mrs Peacock had discovered the joy of growing old disgracefully. She wasn’t inappropriate, she was just fantastically confident. In fact, she was the living embodiment of the philosophy outlined by Jenny Joseph in her wonderful poem ‘Warning (When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple)’. I wish I could just print it all here – and I do encourage you to seek it out – but this taster should give you an idea:

  And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

  It goes on in the same vein, so ebulliently it makes you start to look forward to growing older and throwing off the social strictures of middle youth, where to dress ‘inappropriately’ could have a negative impact on your job prospects, your children, or your chance of finding a new partner.

  What Jenny Joseph and the lady sitting next to me in the hairdresser have both realised is that in style terms, old age is not a restriction, but the start of a new freedom. As Noel Coward so deftly put it: ‘It doesn’t matter how bold you are when the dangerous age is past.’

  Now, that is something to look forward to.

  Knicker elastic

  When I was a child, I was often confused by references in books to knicker elastic and the breaking thereof. This was an event that led to terribly embarrassing moments featuring said knickers around ankles. I could see that it wouldn’t be a good look, but I didn’t really understand the mechanism of how it happened.

  My own undies must have had elastic in them somewhere, I reckoned, but not the kind that could break. They just sort of got baggier over time. An equally mystifying concept was that of putting one’s hankie up one’s knicker leg. I tried it a few times and it just fell out again as soon as I walked. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that the school knickers in question were more like brushed cotton pantaloons with elastic around the legs, as well as around the waist. It must have made a nice little storage area.

  But forget knicker legs – by the time my own daughter is reading (I hope) Noel Streatfeild and Elizabeth Enright and E Nesbit and all the authors I adored as a youngster, I think even the idea of a handkerchief will be weird.

  We have already come upon them, actually, in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, one of our favourites in the Beatrix Potter canon (she’s very keen on the idea of a talking hedgehog). I don’t think she has any idea what little Lucie’s lost ‘pockethandkins’ are, so it’s not an issue at this point, but I’m sure it will be one day. I can imagine the conversation:

  Peggy: ‘What’s a handkin?’

  Me: ‘It’s short for handkerchief, which was a small piece of cotton that people used to carry around to blow their noses on.’

  P: ‘Like a tissue?’

  M: ‘Yes, except we used to wash them and iron them after we’d used them, and then use them again.’

  P: ‘Yucky!’

  I do wonder if anyone uses a proper hankie any more. Everyone did when I was a child; I used to iron my father’s, making sure the embroidered ‘D’ was always on top when I put them away in the drawer.

  I still have loads of my own – they were considered a suitable present for a child in the 1960s. Can you imagine the reaction if you gave a twenty-first-century kid a box of initialled hankies for their birthday? They’d probably beat you to death with their games console. I’ve still got my hankies – in special little embroidered pochettes that my grandmother gave me – and I look at them occasionally, but I don’t ever use them.

  All this makes me wonder what other items that have seemed everyday in my lifetime will become – or already are – as archaic as a crinoline.

  I can think of at least two things from my own youth that, for my daughter’s sake, I am very glad have already gone the way of the dodo: itchy wool and Bri-Nylon. Both of them created garments like mobile torture chambers for children. There was a particular family holiday which was blighted for my brother Nick by a pair of ferociously itchy wool trousers. Just reminding my mother of it can reduce her to tears of laughter. He still doesn’t find it amusing.

  In my own case, I can remember a red-and-white deckchair-stripe summer dress made from 100 per cent Bri-Nylon. It was so completely impermeable it might as well have been made from PVC and my mother was thrilled – it was a homemade number – because the fabric didn’t fray. You could just cut it like a plastic bin liner. On a hot summer day, it was like wearing one, too.

  So while I certainly don’t mourn the passing of such items from everyday life into a footnote in the history of costume, it is unsettling to realise that my own childhood is fast becoming what I used to call ‘the olden days’.

  Well worn

  After giving the matter serious thought – every time I look in the mirror – I have reached a new understanding about ageing. My conclusion is this: it is better to let it wither you than turn you into a hamster-chopped eyes-wide-shut freak-head (those considering surgery, take note).

  There is a way of ageing naturally and still being beautiful – you just have to get used to the idea of beauty in the style of a Roman ruin, rather than a freshly blooming rose.

  The word for it is ‘patina’. People can develop a pleasing patina, just like garden urns softene
d by lichen, Dutch old masters warmed by centuries of tobacco residue, French provincial tables pleasantly hatchet scarred and vintage handbags polished by decades of warm hands on the leather.

  But while I have always loved a bit of crackle glaze on an old jug, I admit it’s taken me a while to appreciate this kind of beauty in human form. I can remember, years ago on a big photo shoot in Los Angeles, being really shocked to see my beauty editor colleague sticking her face towards the midday sun with no SPF on.

  ‘Aren’t you worried about sun damage?’ I asked from beneath the very wide brim of my hat and a mime artist covering of Factor 30.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to get wrinkles. I want to look like Georgia O’Keeffe.’

  At the time I thought she was nuts – and I still wouldn’t advise such cavalier solar exposure for the obvious health reasons – but over time I have come to see the point of that kind of beauty.

  Georgia O’Keeffe’s visage was as cracked and lined as the New Mexico desert landscape that so inspired her, but with her hair pulled back, her eyes twinkling with intelligent amusement, she looked amazing. Her face was like a relief map of the fascinating life she had led.

  In the same way, I have a friend in his nineties who is simply one of the most beautiful men I have ever met. His face is all cheekbones and crevices, bright blue eyes sparking out at you.

  When Paul smiles, his skin breaks up and pieces of his face move around, like continental plates shifting, and his shock of straight white hair sets it all off a treat. I have no idea if he was amazingly handsome in his youth – although I suspect he was – and it doesn’t matter, because the point is how marvellous-looking he is now.

  Keith Richards is another example of this kind of weathered beauty, achieved thirty years younger through serious hard living, and it is interesting to see it starting to develop in people at an even earlier stage.

  The chaps in the re-formed Take That are great examples (although I would say that, because I do love them so…). But even putting aside my pathetic adolescent passion for them, I think Mark and Jason, in particular, look better now they are proper wrinkly men than they did in their peach-cheeked boy band phase. Their faces look slept in, which is a good thing in a man.

  Well, maybe not so good in fellow Take That-er Gary Barlow. He’s the one who writes all the great songs and he looks more like Elton John every time I see him. Maybe it’s all those hours at the piano, but life – or genetics – can be such a bitch, because as Jason and Mark get fabulously haggard, Gary is getting stocky and jowly.

  Wrinkly jowly faces just don’t look beautiful the way wrinkly bony ones do, and that is the problem with aspiring to this patina beauty. You have to be thin to pull it off. It’s all about jutting cheekbones and deep-set eyes.

  So just when I thought I’d got the better of it, there goes ageing one mean-minded sonofabitch step ahead of me again. It’s going to be even more important to be thin at seventy than it was at twenty-five. Damn.

  Waist of space

  I think I am going to have to buy myself a hula hoop. Because isn’t hula-hooping supposed to be the best way to whittle down your waist?

  Not that I have ever been able to keep a hoop hulaing for more than a millisecond. I always start out full of hope, sending it off on its first whirl with a great flourish, then waggling my hips like a crazed belly dancer, but the damn hoop always ends up by my feet the moment I let go of it.

  Despite these setbacks I’m sure I could learn to hula-hoop if I were desperate enough – and I am desperate, having just spent five very lowering minutes flicking through the Burberry look book for next season. It’s all belts. I’m not kidding, there is a belt in every single outfit. Coats, cardigans, jackets, jumpers, day dresses, cocktail dresses, tuxedo pants – men’s tuxedo pants – they all have belts. Even the belts have belts.

  There are all different kinds – wide belts, skinny belts, ribbon belts, elastic belts, tied belts, buckled belts, chain belts – but with one dreadful thing in common: they are all worn neatly around the waist.

  Now, I was mad about those late nineties/early noughties belts – the ones that hid a multitude of sins, hanging low on the hip, just where the tummy can be dodgy. Those belts were my friends. Especially the ones that were made of woven leather so they didn’t have a nasty little hierarchy of holes to remind you what level of a fat day you were having. But these belts are the enemy. These are the kind of belts which didn’t even suit me when I was young and skinny, and now I’m back in belt Siberia.

  Of course, I could just shrug and say, ‘Hey, so no Burberry ready-to-wear for me this season, then’ (like I could ever afford it). But the thing is, at the moment, whatever Burberry designer Christopher Bailey says pretty much goes. He doesn’t single-handedly set the fashion agenda (Stefano Pilati at YSL is doing that these days), but Mr Bailey is a very good barometer of it. He seems to know exactly which key elements to take and use within the slightly limited Burberry repertoire.

  And the really maddening thing is I love the new collection. It’s gorgeous. If I were rich I would want to buy it all, and as things are, I would look forward to buying a few good chain-store rip-offs (‘interpretations’), but I won’t be doing either because I just can’t wear a waistdefining belt.

  So I reckon I have to make a considered decision on this issue. Having accepted that waist-sitting belts of all kinds are probably the key fashion trend for the next year or so, here are what I see as my options:

  Plastic surgery. I’d have to have a breast reduction, several ribs removed and extra length put into my legs. Next.

  Lose fourteen kilos. Well, I would look better in a belt if I didn’t have a spare tyre on either side of it, but when you are short with a ‘womanly’ bosom, I don’t think anything that cuts you in half is ever going to look good. Also I would have absolutely no hips or buttocks at that weight. I’d look like a human wedge of brie. Pointy-end down. With a belt on.

  Ignore the fashion trend. Now that is a radical option, but one I have absolutely no intention of taking. I already feel left out. I want to play too.

  Find a cunning way to make the look work for me. Now, I think there just might be something I can do with a narrow belt over a light knit and then a cropped jacket over the top… I think it could work.

  Or I could just wear a hula hoop as a belt.

  Letting go

  I have been pondering a lot recently on the subject of letting yourself go. Or, as you more usually hear it, the phrase ‘She’s really let herself go.’ It’s funny, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that about themselves, or about a man. It’s a judgement that is laid down on women, usually by other women.

  Working at home, as I do at the moment, I am all too aware of the possibility of someone saying it about me sometime soon. When you work alone, at an activity where comfort is paramount (you try sitting at a computer for ten hours in tight pants), there is all too strong a temptation to drift through the day in socks, pyjamas and a cardigan, hair pulled back into the de rigeur scruffy ponytail.

  It gets worse: this outfit can then all too easily be worn to the corner shop with just a raincoat over the top and Birkenstocks on the feet. Adding to the general effect, your hair might not be washed quite often enough and make-up becomes something for high days and holidays. What is this thing you call lipstick?

  It takes something hideous like bumping into an ex-lover or, even worse, an ex-love rival in this state to realise that you have allowed yourself to turn from a butterfly back into a bug.

  But despite the fact I am sitting here, pretty much as described above, I don’t think I have really let myself go. This is just deep scruffiness; it’s nothing that can’t easily be corrected by a quick hairwash and blow-dry, a bit of slap, some tailoring, a tasty pair of high heels, a swipe of MAC lippie and a squirt of Calèche. That would take me half an hour, max.

  Letting yourself go properly takes a lot more commitment. I don’t think someone can really be said to h
ave let themselves go until they have reached the point that scrubbing them up would take days, if not months, to achieve.

  For one thing, serious weight gain is always a major part of a proper letting-go. Weight gain that has gone way beyond those few pesky extra kilos into actual obesity. But fat is just part of it. Hair is left to rack and ruin, allowed to grow long and wild, with grey roots. Skin is left to return to nature, as is superfluous hair of all kinds, including that on the chin, often growing out of a fat wart. Yes, letting go is the apotheosis of all crimes against our worst fattist, ageist, looks-ist prejudices. And that is why I think there is something almost glorious in it.

  Last summer I was staying in a small coastal town which seemed to have attracted an unusual proportion of women in this state. They waddled along the street, with the proverbial spare tyres – but actual size – visibly rolling beneath their jersey clothes.

  And that was one of the things I loved about them. They had let go to such an extent they didn’t even bother with any of the desperate camouflage clothing most women resort to before they quite give up – the almost-chic elastic-waist linen pants and hip-skimming tops.

  No such compromises for these girls; they were letting it all hang out, many of them in tight jersey leggings and quite a few in shorts – probably because the cut of those garments prevented their mighty thighs chafing together. Many of them broke that other commandment of female allure and walked along the road eating huge ice-creams.