But Caitríona, who a) lives in New York, and b) is glamorous, has taken a different approach and is full of talk of a big, big party. The words ‘champagne cocktails’ have been mentioned more than once.
As for me, although I don’t want a party, being fifty doesn’t scare me at all. I know that most people will think I’m nuts, but for the last few birthdays – forty-eight and forty-nine – I’ve been impatient to get to fifty. Fifty feels welcoming to me. It feels safe, like a cocoon. ‘Come on in,’ it says, ‘we’re a lot happier in here. People don’t pester us so much. They patronize us a little, but we’re wise enough to not mind.’
By contrast I remember my twenty-fifth birthday, when I was in the absolute horrors. I felt as old as the hills and like my glittering future was long behind me and certainly, by all the ways we measure success in our society, I had failed.
I knew the things I ‘needed’ in order to be happy: a perfect man (good-looking but not so good-looking that I’d be a permanent nervous wreck waiting for him to run off with someone else), a well-paid job that involved travelling to places like New York, and a mortgage on a one-bedroomed flat where the wardrobe door closed properly and the cutlery wasn’t plastic. And, of course, I needed to be a size 8 – or a size 6 preferably – and to be able to get my hair blow-dried three times a week and to buy enough shoes to qualify as an addict.
But my reality was very different. I was living in a rented flat with two other girls. We had milk in our fridge approximately once a year. I drank too much and spent my electricity money on lip gloss and wondered when exactly God was going to send the right man along, because despite all the teachings of feminism, I was convinced I’d never be happy until I had the perfect boyfriend. But as the unsuitable men and discarded relationships mounted up, I often jerked awake in the middle of the night, my heart pounding with fear, aware that time was racing by, that my window of opportunity was closing and that if something didn’t happen soon, I’d be alone for ever.
My career wasn’t exactly flourishing either. Although I had a law degree, I never did the necessary further studies to qualify as a lawyer. (I was a top-notch self-saboteur without even knowing the phrase.)
(However, may I say that I had a gym membership – that counted for something, right? I went to the gym an awful, awful lot. Which was good, because I also ate an awful, awful lot. Exercise bulimia, there was another thing that I was experiencing, without even knowing it existed.)
So there I was, on my twenty-fifth birthday, convinced that there was a secret formula which would guarantee that I’d be HATT (happy all the time). That was the promise of movies and ads and magazines: get everything in place emotionally, financially and domestically, then put that happiness in a shoebox (a nice one, Sophia Webster does lovely ones, with little grosgrain ribbons) and put that box on a high shelf where it would never be disturbed.
Thereafter my life would flow along smoothly, with enhanced add-ons like holidays and happy family occasions, and I’d have a lovely, lovely time, until one day, in a faraway sunlit future, surrounded by loving friends and family, I’d die.
But I just couldn’t find that secret formula. I seemed to be perpetually on the outside looking in, watching as others got their lives together. Eventually, I went to night classes to study accountancy, even though my heart wasn’t in it, because I had to do something.
My thirtieth birthday – a milestone – was really quite tragic: I was alone and drinking. But within days I began, out of the blue, to write funny little short stories. A few months later, I went into rehab and got sober.
Then all kinds of wonderful things began to happen. I met a lovely man who was different from the poor creatures I’d tried to take hostage in the past. I wrote a book and it was published. I wrote another book and that was published too, and suddenly I had a career. In fact, you could say I was LTD (living the dream).
But guess what? I wasn’t HATT! I knew I’d been extraordinarily, bizarrely lucky but I also knew that if I didn’t work until I dropped, both on writing books and publicizing them, I’d squander the chance I’d been given. I was always afraid – afraid I wouldn’t be able to write another book, afraid that it wouldn’t be as good as the previous one and all that blah-de-blah worrying that I’m sure you’ll just dismiss as self-indulgence (I would too, if I were you …).
I got married to my lovely man and we hoped to have a big family – in our more delusional moments we talked about having six nippers – but as it transpired, we weren’t able to have any. And that was shocking and sad and put paid to any HATT-ness for a good while. But over time the grief passed, and I saw how much love and luck I’d been given and that no one gets everything and that I’d be happier if I focused on what I had, rather than what I hadn’t.
Then I was forty, and I’ll tell you something: forty was great! Years forty to forty-five were very nice. In my constant battle with sugar, I wielded the whip-hand and I was looking good, and when I say good, I mean, of course, thin. I was more secure in my job, I took the attitude that if I did my best that that was acceptable, and all in all, life was lovely.
Then things went a bit skaw-ways and I had a breakdown where a powerful truth was revealed to me: it didn’t matter how hard I worked, I’d never be HATT. Up until then, I’d been thinking of being happy as the ‘right’ way to feel – in fact, the only way to feel. But now, as I near fifty, I accept that happiness is simply one of thousands of emotions any person will experience in a life.
Another delightful side-effect of my fifty-ness is that I’m a lot better at standing up for myself. I try to do it politely. But I do do it. I had a recent contretemps with a young woman in a hotel when both my electronic door keys failed and I had to traipse all the way back down to reception, where the keys were replaced without a word of apology. ‘And you’re sorry, yes?’ I said. ‘For the inconvenience?’ The look on her face was priceless: she was luminous with shock.
Healthwise, with fish oils and yoga and whatnot, fifty is the new twenty-nine, and this is great. But the pressure is also on to look youthful, and honestly, I don’t see anything wrong with looking not-young.
So what are my thoughts on cosmetic surgery? Well, I’m not going to say, ‘Never say never,’ because for some reason the phrase makes big smacky-rage rise in me.
I haven’t had Botox, because my face is a bit lopsided and I depend on keeping everything animated so that people don’t notice. Regarding Restylane, I had one disastrous go about seven years ago, where a lump, like a baby-unicorn horn, sat between my eyebrows for three months, so I’m not doing it again. Wrinkles-wise, my face isn’t too ravaged. This I put down to drinking two litres of waters a day … and using colossally expensive skincare. Also, being tubby helps. This is not something I’ve chosen, I’d be delighted to give ‘skinny and haggard’ a go, but despite my best efforts, I can’t shift my excess weight.
That’s another thing about being nearly fifty – the way my metabolism has come screeching to an abrupt halt. I still exercise, but it no longer seems to have any effect.
For all of my life, it was the size of my arse that caused me the most hand-wringing, but in this nearly-fifty zone it’s my stomach that’s the problem. It seems to have broken free from its moorings and there’s no knowing how far it will roam.
I’ve been fighting it for a long time, trying to make the clothes in the shops work for me, clothes that are catwalked by sixteen-year-old anorexic models. But I felt increasingly exhausted and – yes – foolish.
And I knew I’d crossed some sort of line when I homed in on NYDJ (Not Your Daughter’s Jeans) and felt gidd
y with delight inside the high-waist-banded, tummy-supported set-up.
One thing I’m not giving up on is my hair: I can’t even contemplate letting the grey get a look-in. ‘They’ say you’re supposed to lighten your hair colour as you age, but I tried it and it made me look like I had malaria, so I went back to getting it dyed dark again.
Being fifty means that I’m probably more than halfway through my life, but I’ve no fear of dying – again, I know this is unusual. It’s not that I’m religious – on the contrary – so I don’t see myself skipping around on the sunny uplands of heaven in an afterlife that resembles Little House on the Prairie. Maybe gratitude for my own mortality is one of the happy side-effects of having chronic depression – which just goes to show that everything has a silver lining!
All in all, I can’t wait to be fifty – although I draw the line at having a party. No one enjoys their own party: they’re too busy trying to blend people from all the separate parts of their life and make them get along. And to be honest, I don’t enjoy any party – all the screeching ‘You look fabulous!’, ‘No, you look fabulous!’ is extremely tiring.
These days, I’m getting better and better at doing as I please, so for my half-century I’m going down the road to Pizza Express with my nearest and dearest.
People say that living to fifty is an achievement – but actually it’s a gift. A gift that at times I didn’t want and would have happily left outside the local Sue Ryder shop, but a gift that I now accept graciously.
In my fifty years on the planet I’ve learnt that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. And I’m glad I’m here to live it.
Previously unpublished.
A YEAR IN THE LIFE
* * *
I used to write a newsletter every month and had to stop when everything went a bit pear-shaped on the mental-health front. Mercifully I am now ‘greatly restored’, but in the interim I’d discovered the joy that is Twitter and now I do all my news on that instead. So, sadly, no newsletters have been written in recent times. But when I reread what I’d written this particular year (2006), I realized how little I and my life and friends etc. have changed, so even though some things are different (e.g. Dermot O’Leary is no longer on Big Brother’s Little Brother, in fact Big Brother’s Little Brother no longer exists), this gives a very accurate account of my daily life. So I hope you will forgive the dated bits and enjoy the rest.
January
January gloom!
Soup!
Dermot O’Leary!
January: a shocking month for everyone. Myself, I didn’t want to leave the house, I didn’t want to speak to anyone and I didn’t want to wash myself (although in fairness, I never do. Want to, that is).
All I wanted to do was make soup – sweetcorn chowder, curried parsnip, spinach and nutmeg, you name it, I wanted to make it.
I spent many hours fiddling in the kitchen, wearing a shower cap (to protect my hair from cooking smells) and liquidizing things and freezing the excess in Tupperware containers, just like a proper person.
On 12 Jan had to ‘go outside’ and fly to London to be on Celebrity Big Brother’s Little Breakfast with the delicious, the adorable, the hilarious Dermot O’Leary. Himself and Suzanne came with me, and Suzanne managed to persuade one of the George Galloway supporters to give her his George Galloway rosette-style badge. However, after he’d handed it over, it transpired that the badge was not, in fact, his to give – it belonged to the production company and they wanted it back.
An ‘incident’ occurred. But Suzanne is nothing if not tenacious and held on to it and wore it with pride on the tube to work and then on the plane to Ireland (where she was going later that day).
The next day was Saturday, and the funny thing is that I hadn’t been shopping for ages (as a result of the New Stinginess) and normally I couldn’t be arsed dragging myself around the sales because I never get bargains, I only ever buy a load of shite which I convince myself is worth the reduced price and which I NEVER wear.
But, bizarrely, I found a lovely anorak in the Nicole Farhi sale at half price and seeing as the dry-cleaners melted my last one, which I used to live in, I snapped it up!
Then I nearly got a bargain! Long story. Ages ago Himself bought me some lovely, lovely underwear from Myla, dark blue silk with lighter blue polka dots and a discreet pink frill. (Man buys lady-underwear that isn’t red, polyester or crotchless! Bizarre!) And I liked it so much that I decided to get my youngest sister Rita-Anne the same set for Christmas. Then, in Prague, Caitríona saw it and she wanted a set too, so I said I’d get it for her for her birthday (in Feb). But when I tried ordering it from the Myla site, they didn’t have it in her size. So that was that, it seemed. Great disappointment. But then, when I was in Selfridges, didn’t I see the Myla underwear, in the sale! At half price! In many sizes! Possibly including Caitríona’s! The only problem was that I couldn’t remember her bra size because my memory is gone to hell even though I’m eating a lot of oily fish, and I couldn’t ring her because it was only 6 a.m. in New York and she works very hard and I didn’t want to wake her at that time on a Saturday morning, even if it was for a cut-price Myla bra.
Then I remembered that she was the same size as Rita-Anne! All I had to do was ring Rita-Anne, ask her her bra size, then buy it! But Jimmy answered the phone and told me Rita-Anne was at yoga, and once again I thought, ‘Ah well, that’s that.’ Then I had the strangest idea. It was a long shot, but it might just work … ‘Jimmy,’ I said, ‘could you do me a massive favour.’ Now, ontra noo, I wasn’t holding out much hope because you know what mens are like, but it was my only chance. ‘Jimmy,’ I said, ‘you are a man and don’t notice these sorts of things, but at Christmas I gave R-A a lovely set of blue silk underwear –’
‘I know it!’ he said. ‘Yes, I know it!’
God above! But then again, they’re only newly in love really.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was wearing it last night!’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Great, great! Can you check the bra size?’
So he duly did and then I went and bought the set and they wrapped it specially because it was a present and I rang Caitríona (at a more sensible time) and told her the joyous news, but now I can’t find the shagging thing anywhere! I don’t know what I’ve done with it. I might have left it in London; I’m hoping to God I did, because if it’s not there, it’s lost for ever. You see, I have a bargain-repeller zone. Even when I find them, I lose them!
While I was in London, I must have done something to offend the god of water, whoever he or she is. On the night we arrived, the hot water wasn’t working, so when I had to get up in the middle of the night (5.30 a.m.) to be collected for Dermot, I had to have a miserable cold shower, because I couldn’t possibly be smelly for my beloved Dermot. Then the next day the COLD water was broken, so there was nothing coming out of any of the taps and we couldn’t fill the kettle or flush the loo or anything, and normally I’m thrilled at a bone-fide, cast-iron opportunity to not wash myself, but when I had no choice in the matter, I didn’t like it one bit.
Previously unpublished.
February
Detox!
Wedding-dress shopping!
Ready Steady Lose!
Other than a detox – in which I consumed over the course of twenty-four hours the juice of eighteen carrots, three whole cucumbers, six red peppers, three pears, six apples and a big lump of ginger – it was a fairly quiet month.
I began the month trying to work on the new book and in the grip of despair – worse than the despair I feel when I
realize a play is three acts long (which is acute despair). I couldn’t create a new character and I felt worthless and hopeless, but I ploughed on anyway and eventually got somewhere!
It was thrilling! I haven’t much written, but I’m encouraged by the way it’s going. This will undoubtedly change, it always does, but it is better to be facing into three months of touring feeling upbeat rather than bereft.
Last Friday, Himself, myself, my mother and Rita-Anne went wedding-dress shopping and it was wonderful. When I saw her in the first dress, I cried like a sap – my little baby sister was all grown up! We went to a couple of shops, then we went to Brown Thomas, which normally my mother refuses to go into because it’s too dear, but no sooner were we through the doors than she sort of tensed and sniffed the air, like an animal scenting prey. ‘LV bags,’ she said, her eyes gone milky and blind, like she was having a vision.
Yes! We were indeed in the LV bag department, and she had sensed it rather than seen it. ‘Wheelie ones,’ she said. ‘Little wheelie ones you can bring on a plane.’
I asked her if she wanted one, then she seemed to come to and said briskly, ‘No, not at all, what would the likes of me be doing with an LV wheelie case. Some oul’ yoke from Leather Plus will do me.’
Then I managed to talk them into coming to look at Missoni coats because, mes amies, I’ve had a great – cunning – idea. Because Caitríona and I are bridesmaids (well, I am matron of honour. Christ! A matron. Anyway), I have fashioned (pun) a great idea. Instead of the horrible meringuey dresses bridesmaids usually have to wear, why don’t we wear Missoni coats?! Stylish, chic, practical, warm and – well, it’s a MISSONI COAT!!!!
I thought my mother would hate them, just on principle, but no, oh no, indeed no. She was very, very, very taken with them and examined them in great, excited detail. (She didn’t see the prices.)