After years in denial, I found my inner Essex girl at 50
As TOWIE returns for its 10th year, Miranda Levy admits that she’s finally come to love Chigwell
These actual words came out of my mouth yesterday morning: “I can’t have another session this week, because I’m having my fillers done.” A couple of thoughtful planks later, I told Karen, my personal trainer: “But maybe I can go for a swim. I’m not getting my blow-dry ’til tomorrow.”
Time-travelling from 10 years ago, I would have spluttered, agape. For though I have spent most of my career in women’s journalism, I was always more of a bluestocking type, than a glamorous “beauty person”. Rightly – or almost certainly wrongly, as I have now discovered – I felt that I was above all that sort of thing. I had read James Joyce’s Ulysses (sort of). I holidayed last winter in Nicaragua rather than Ibiza. I even share a literary agency with the rediscovered Russian author Vasily Grossman.
Yet here I am today, sounding like a minor cast-member of TOWIE.
The Only Way Is Essex returned to our screens for its 10th anniversary on Sunday evening. If you are unfamiliar with Joey Essex (his real name), Gemma Collins et al, you’ve not missed much. A semi-scripted reality show with a cast of thousands, comedian Gráinne Maguire summed it up as “a never-ending hen night mixed with Waiting for Godot.”
Not that I would really know. I have managed maybe 10 minutes of its plotless Estuary whining. But TOWIE and I are inextricably linked. Much of the show is set in Chigwell, the north-east London/essex suburb where I grew up. In the Seventies, Chigwell was a pretty little village; a place where Eastenders-made-good (my father was a Hackney-born dentist) chose to bring up their families. It was pleasant, semi-rural, and not embarrassing at all.
But then, the Eighties arrived – and with them “Loadsamoney”, white stilettos, Malibu and pineapple, and Sharon and Tracy. The jokes soon started: we were the UK’S version of the New Jersey “bridge-and-tunnel” brigade, apparently of rather loose morals. How can you tell an Essex girl has had an orgasm? She drops her chips. And so on.
It really became unbearable in the era of Lesley Joseph – remember
Dorian? – and the execrable sitcom Birds of a Feather, set in Chigwell itself.
As soon as I hit 18, I couldn’t get away fast enough. By the time Birds had flown in 1998, I was firmly ensconced in a beautiful Edwardian house in Highgate, north London. I wasn’t alone in my betrayal of my home county: none of my local friends went back to Essex after university.
Then, in summer 2016 – after three decades in north London – I found myself back in Chigwell. I was recovering from surgery and a marriage split; my father generously opened his doors to me, so I packed up my books and paintings, and returned to my childhood home.
Grateful as I was to stay in a comfortable house in an affluent suburb, I didn’t broadcast my move. Ever-soslightly ashamed of my Essex postcode, I told people I still lived in London. By then, Chigwell – as well as its neighbours, Brentwood and Loughton – was synonymous with TOWIE, which even won an audience award at the BAFTAS.
Real gloom set in for me when I saw the fate of my favourite pub, the King’s
Head, where I had spent many happy late-teen evenings. The real Tudor inn (as opposed to the mock Tudor of many of Chigwell’s houses) was built in 1547 and mentioned in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge. The building is now owned by Lord Sugar, and part of it has been turned into Sheesh, a fancy Turkish restaurant surrounded by parked Ferraris.
I’ve never seen the chocolate mock-croc banquettes or enormous gold chandeliers, because I’ve hitherto been too snobbish to go inside. “It’s a hideousness of lip-fillers and vacuous conversations about acrylic nails,” I wrote to a friend last year. But by then I was starting to sound like a hypocrite. My creeping Chigwell-isation had begun. Having put on weight during my years of illness, I decided to pay someone to make me move. Karen the Trainer started coming to my house twice a week for walking, squatting, boxing. Karen was tough, sunny and knew how to push me to my limit without totally destroying me. But most of all, she had excellent nails, in a beautiful array of colours.
I’d never had colour on my hands before, but she inspired me to take the plunge on Chigwell Parade, where the ladies of Arissa nailbar painted me with OPI’S Malaga Wine, a sort of rouge noir. Ooh, I
liked it. I paid a couple of extra quid for the gel version which means your hands are dry immediately, and you don’t smudge an hour’s work rooting in your bag for your purse. I get my hands done twice a month now – with a pedicure every four weeks.
A few weeks after the nail adventure, I was having my eyebrows waxed when the beautician asked: “Why are you scowling at me?” I wasn’t, I was perfectly happy, but when I went home and studied my face, it was true: I was a bit down-inthe mouth, and creased of brow. I made a decision. I didn’t want to look younger than my years, but I didn’t want to look miserable, or cross, either.
I did a lot of due diligence. Round here, they do aesthetic treatments in nail bars and hairdressers and there was no way I was taking that risk. I found a qualified surgeon in local Buckhurst Hill and went for Botox in my frown lines and marionette lines (the creases at the corner of my mouth). Yes, I was nervous, and yes, it hurt a bit – like having a dental injection in your forehead. But I immediately looked fresher – and happier.
The Essexification didn’t end with my appearance. I started to make friends in the area, particularly in the two boutiques on the Parade. I now have porn star martinis in the King William with Donna, owner of Space. Queen of the Parade is Debra Seller, whose creations have been in every
Ever-soslightly ashamed of my Essex postcode, I told people I still lived in London
It became unbearable in the era of the execrable sitcom, Birds of a Feather
episode of TOWIE.
Much of Debra’s fare is a bit “blingy” for me – some of the styles and colours are clearly made for perma-tanned, size six gym-bunnies. But I did find the most terrific black, swooshy Gracia dress there, which I am wearing for my belated birthday party later this month.
I also started to look at Chigwell itself in a whole new light. It’s actually lovely around here. There are fields two minutes from my house, but a few miles down the road are the newly hipster areas of Leytonstone and Walthamstow.
Still, for hair and beauty, my heart lies in this red loop at the top right of the Tube map. My hair was, in fact, the last hurdle to fall. I only had it coloured for the first time last autumn, at the age of 51. If I want lustrous locks, a frown-free forehead and killer nails, I have earned them. It doesn’t mean I can’t read Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, nor see Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt – if my performance ever gets rescheduled.
I’m now happy to shout about my Chigwell-isation. It was, in fact, Karen the Trainer who suggested I write this piece. “You should hear yourself,” she laughed, as I discussed my exercise and injectables conundrum. And so, I have promised to take her for dinner with the proceeds of publication. See you in Sheesh…