CURL UP AND DYE?

Every so often, these days, it’s time to get the grey hairs blitzed. For a few weeks, then, I feel young again: or at least, I look younger, because in my head I still haven’t grown up. I think I’ve stalled somewhere around the end of my twenties… possibly because that’s when I made a number of those scary life-changing decisions which tend to define us as proper grown-ups. But with life-changing decisions comes responsibility, and with responsibility comes worry and with worry come grey hairs and wrinkles and all those other things we all swore would never happen to us. And then it’s time for the evasive action: the brushes and foils and cotton wool and plastic shoulder-shields come out, the hairdresser puts on a serious face and some rubber gloves and gets to work, and suddenly you’re getting through half a morning of small talk and trashy magazines, not just half an hour. The whole thing’s exhausting.

But is this really it? Middle age? Middle age, when I was growing up, was a pretty clear definition. It was people’s mums and dads… the boring old teachers at school… those anonymous adults you encountered regularly, like the bus driver, the milkman, the doctor, the dentist. People who, as I informed my parents confidently as a child, had been born in the middle ages. I’ve reached and passed the kind of birthdays which conferred this definition in my childish mind, but am planning to remain in complete denial about it until retirement at least. And if the noises emerging from various government departments are anything to go by, that could be quite some time away. I refuse to dress my age. It amuses me greatly that so many high street shops have their target customer so clearly in mind, in terms of age: it’s almost as obvious as the age labels on children’s clothes. Top Shop and River Island are not for the likes of me. Next or Oasis: just about, unless I put on lots of weight. Wallis – maybe not quite yet, or am I missing something? I walked into that shop on Saturday and found myself floundering in a sea of beige and mid=navy, among women who seemed much older than I’d ever care to look. I read somewhere that Principles, relaunched in Debenhams stores by designer Ben de Lisi, has ‘downshifted’ the age of its target client from 35-40 to 30-35. And Marks & Spencer is the funniest of all: Limited Collection for the young and fashionable, Autograph for Limited Collection woman’s sensible older sister, Per Una for her rather more robustly built cousin, Indigo for the trendy aunt and Classic for her, well, rather ‘classic’ mum. Sometimes it’s fun to confuse the assistant and buy across the ranges a bit, and imply a kind of style schizophrenia… and nowhere is this happening more at the moment than in those holy towers of middle-aged yummy mummydom, the Boden catalogue. Boden recently launched a teenage range – somewhere halfway between the cute little outfits of Mini Boden and the matching patterns, which go together just like the mummy and daddy of middle England’s once-typical nuclear family, of Boden itself. So far, so sensibly filling a gap in the market, but what they didn’t anticipate was that some of their key adult customers would start dressing in the teenage range. I think they’re feeling a bit like a woman who thought she was ‘past it’ but was chatted up by someone she found unattractive on a night out in response to this… a mixture of flattered and despairing. Mutton is dressing as lamb, perhaps, but it must be fairly slim, well-preserved mutton and anyway, in a recession, who are they to turn away sales?

And then there’s music. Because I’m getting on just ever so slightly in years, the teenagers of my acquaintance tend to assume I’ll listen to awful music… Daniel O’Donnell, perhaps, or Cliff Richard, or the kind of thing you hear on Classic Gold type radio, like the Carpenters or the Seekers. You know. The kind of stuff that was in the charts away back in the distant past, when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young. Okay, granted I don’t listen to the extremes of what seems popular with the currently young – dance music gives me an unpleasant heart arrhythmia, while the intricacies of metal (black, death, thrash, heavy.. terminology I know only because a very patient 18 year old tried to explain them to me recently) just leave me with a sore head and a feeling of mild disorientation. But if musical tastes were expressed as a Venn diagram, what’s on my iPod or in my CD collection does intersect with the circles of what’s listened to by those much younger than myself. And that’s not just because shows like ‘The X Factor’ is making everybody’s taste homogeneously bland, either… I might start the day listening to Thea Gilmore or Tori Amos and end it with the after-dark melancholy of Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits. I love making new discoveries or receiving interesting recommendations… whether they come from people younger than, older than or around the same age as myself. It’s much the same with TV and radio. There are programmes aimed at demographics which are not so obvious, but which are really just the same as the CBeebies or CITV type thing designed to keep the kids quiet for a while in the afternoons. When I started work, aged 24, I started watching ‘Coronation Street’: this was because almost everyone with whom I was working closely every day was quite a bit older than me, and they all watched it. Now I, in turn, am one of those people in the corner of the staff room at work, a bit older, a bit more cynical, and yes… I still watch ‘Coronation Street’ when I get around to it. But I watch ‘Neighbours’ too… and that’s because I remember, very fondly, its cult viewing at university. People dashed from the dining hall to the TV room every lunchtime, back then, mug of instant coffee in one hand, chocolate hobnob in the other, for that day’s essential viewing. Ironic posters of Jason Donovan were plastered on bedroom walls and we all tried to imagine what it would be like to have a ‘barbie’ outside at Christmas. Although these days I don’t watch all that much TV, what I do watch tends to be far from the stereotype of anybody’s age bracket. It might be ‘X Factor’ or ‘The Late Review’, ‘Waterloo Road’ or ‘University Challenge’… the common denominator is that, if I haven’t had enough sleep and have had far too much to do at work, I’ll fall asleep in front of any of them. And I suppose that’s where age really does get me. Likewise, I prefer to wake up to Chris Evans than Chris Moyles… the ranting, the in-jokes and the chaotic hilarity of Radio 1, which amused me as a student, just irritate me now, whereas the more gentle, real-world humour of Radio 2, where people might be talking about issues in the news, their lingering coughs or aching joints, the weather, that film they saw or the virtues of a nice warm cardigan is so much more conducive to starting the working day in a happy frame of mind. All that and good music too: not forgetting the occasional ‘oldies’.

And I could go on. The books we read, the newspapers, the magazines… I don’t read ‘The Oldie’, yet, but I have graduated from ‘Just 17’ (at 14), through ‘19’ (at 17), ‘Cosmopolitan’ (at university), ‘Glamour’ (early 20s), ‘Marie Claire’ (after that) to the inevitability of things like ‘Red’ and ‘Easy Living’. You can spot the intended audience by the free gifts on the cover: these days it’s things like hand-cream or a sample of an anti-ageing potion. Ahead lie the terrors of ‘Good Housekeeping’ with its gardening gloves and recipes and knitting patterns. Then I really will be scared. It all makes me think of that Jenny Joseph poem about the woman who intends to ‘wear purple’ and behave rebelliously when she becomes ‘an old woman’. I already wear purple. In fact I always have. I remember being told off in primary school when we had to write the ‘favourite colour’ poem and I didn’t choose red or yellow or blue like everybody else. I picked purple, and got into trouble, because it was hard to rhyme, and associated with miserable things rather than the nice, happy issues of the nice, happy primary colours of the nice, happy world of primary school. I suppose, as a slightly awkward child (extremely quiet, but prone to asking the sort of questions that puzzled my parents and disconcerted my teachers), perhaps I was refusing to ‘act my age’ back then too. Perhaps there’s a logic behind having had an atypical obsession, at 13 or 14, with listening to the radio with the lights off or reading poetry, when everybody in my class was watching ‘Dallas’ or ‘The Thorn Birds’. Perhaps what I am really trying to say is that, just as we shouldn’t let ourselves be defined by our gender or our ethnic origin or our religious beliefs or affiliations, the school we went to or the clothes we wear, we shouldn’t for a second accept definition by age.

I have to admit it. I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m not as young as I wish I still were. Ageing is inevitable and is the price we pay for our survival. We’re told, every so often, that X is the new Y. 40 is the new 30; 50 is the new 40; 80 is the new 65. Some of this has to do with population trends, retirement ages and life expectancy, but I prefer to think about it all in terms of what life feels like at a certain point. When I blinked in disbelief into the cold October darkness at 6:30 this morning, I felt old. Really old. Aching and exhausted and incredulous, almost betrayed, at the realization that it was time to get up and start the working week. When things went fairly well at work as the day progressed, when someone made me laugh or someone else said something nice, I felt the years evaporate. When I drop my book tonight as I try again, in vain, to keep my eyes open for long enough to read just one more chapter, I’ll age again. There’s no science fiction involved. It’s just life, and how it makes me feel, and I bet it’s just the same for you too as you’re reading this. Maybe time isn’t linear after all. Maybe it goes round and round in circles like the amorphous outlines of clouds… merging, banking, expanding and thinning until any attempted description of their shape or progress feels like the work of a madman…

All the same. In another few weeks, it’ll be time to get those grey hairs seen to again… to add a bit of gloss and shine and make myself feel better. The advertising campaigns would tell me it’s because I’m worth it or attest to the value of some kind of girl-powered ‘me’ time, but really… sometimes, if you’re trying to affirm your feeling of youthfulness and vitality, that you’re not invisible and you’re still of relevance to the world… sometimes you just have to do it. You just have to curl up, preferably with a good book, a mug of coffee and just possibly a nice fur-covered hot water bottle, and dye.