How to turn 60 if you’re ageorexic*
*That’s a fear of getting older
Bikinis. Botox. Fat freezing. Fillers. CHRISTA D’SOUZA has used every trick to fight her advancing years. Now, as she celebrates a milestone birthday, is it finally time to grow up?
UI will not retire while I’ve still got my legs and my make-up box
BETTE DAVIS
nlike me, my partner loves a birthday party. Thank goodness then, that lockdown hit when it did and his grand plans to throw me a big, splashy 60th were scuppered.
All those ‘amusing’ greetings cards and jokes about the cake collapsing under the weight of the candles — uggh, i truly dodged a bullet there. But as a columnist who champions older people (and indeed wrote a book about the menopause years before it became ‘trendy’ to do so), i realise how letting the day pass
unnoticed makes me a traitor to my own cause. How can i call out examples of everyday ageism in this newspaper if entering my seventh decade is something that i’d prefer to keep private?
so here i am officially celebrating my birthday with you. And if you want to know what it actually feels like … on one level it feels broadly the same as it felt turning 59 or 58 or 57 and so on. so no big deal.
But on another level it feels completely, utterly, wrenchingly preposterous. An outrage, in fact. How on earth can i be the same age as my granny was when i was 18? How can my mother have a 60- year-old daughter?
Unlike 40 or 50, 60 is not just a number: it’s a huge, huge milestone. Don’t let Madonna or anyone else tell you otherwise. the stark fact of the matter is that in a piddling 20 years (the last of which went by in a flash), i will be 80.
Perhaps we should call 60 something different — Fifty ten say, to ease us in more gently?
these are the thoughts that have me sitting bolt upright in my bed at four in the morning nowadays.
But then, no wonder, given my history of ‘ageorexia’. ever since my mid-40s, i’ve resisted ‘ coinciding’ with my biological age — as the famous feminist writer simone De Beauvoir once put it — wearing the mini skirt, packing the bikini, believing middle age happened ‘only if you were ornery or slovenly enough to let it’. so of course turning 60 came as a shock.
AAD yet, as i sit here at my kitchen table in the warm light of day, i have to acknowledge what a relief it is finally to be here. For in a way, my 50s felt like being in limbo. i don’t want to write them off, because they were fun and productive, but there was something equivocal about them, something which felt neither here nor there — and that, in retrospect, was confusing.
in contrast, there is nothing equivocal at all about turning 60. No fooling myself that i am still of ‘cougar’ age. to paraphrase victor Hugo, i am now, officially, in the youth of old age as opposed to the old age of youth.
Yes, it is daunting. sixty? Moi? every time i see it written down, i get a little jolt. But while it feels daunting, it also feels liberating. Might 60 be when i can finally act my age?
My 50s were fun, but also a bit of a no (wo)man’s land. in our parents’ day we knew exactly what 50 looked like and how it should comport itself.
But thanks to the leaps and bounds made by science and technology, not to mention the acceptability of cosmetic intervention, 50 now feels fuzzy, indefinable.
Or maybe contradictory is the word. if 50 really is the new 30 and the decade we are supposed to go clothes shopping with our daughters and our sons’ girlfriends and prance about the beach in our string bikinis like Liz Hurley, where does the menopause fit in?
How come nature hasn’t acknowledged the goalpost shift, too?
encouraged — or should i say taunted — by role models such as 55-year- old Liz, and Demi Moore (57) and Cindy Crawford (54), not to mention all those silicon valley moguls investing billions in the longevity industry, we kid ourselves into thinking that if we up the amount of hours at the gym, keep taking the Hrt and throw yet more money at the latest miracle beauty treatment, we can somehow halt the ravages of time.
But we cannot, as the menopause — which hits us at the same age it has for hundreds of years — proves. And maybe that dissonance is what is making us feel so, well, neither here nor there.
Our 50s, i’d argue, is when we are at our most porous to the enticements of the anti-ageing industry. No wonder it’s worth more than £40.7 billion worldwide. it certainly made a packet out of me — and will probably continue to do so.
For years, i’ve been going to a lady called Magda for coolsculpting — where fat cells are killed off by being cooled to near freezing — which has done wonders for my mummy tummy.
then there’s the twice-yearly Botox and filler i get from my miracle worker of a doctor, suha Kersh (thank goodness her surgery is finally back open).
As i write this, i am test- driving a new home laser device on my jawline and this afternoon i’ll be taking a Pilates class on Zoom. After i’ve taken the dog for a twohour walk, that is. You should see how obsessive i’ve become since lockdown about my 20,000 steps a day.
But turning 60, i can’t help wondering — especially on that last killer hill i make myself do every damn day, rain or shine — to what end exactly? it’s not as though i’m in the market for a new partner after all. i’ve been with mine very happily for 24 years. everyone wants to be healthy and trim for as long as possible, but is that my goal: to be buried in a size 10?
i’m proud of myself that i can still (just) wear a bikini, but the waistlength hair and the cache of lovingly distressed denim micro minis i’ve got in my bottom drawer in the hope of going back to Mykonos this summer? i think it is time finally to say goodbye to them.
if there is a cut- off point for ridiculously long hair and minis, for me it is now. the problem with
Since my 40s, I’ve resisted my biological age, believing middle age only happened if you let it