Here’s one more sign of ageing those cosmetics people can add to the list

Iam simultaneously thrilled and intrigued by the news that Clarins’ latest serum is scientifically proven to combat the five signs of ageing. The intrigue comes from my firm memory of Oil of Ulay announcing, some 20-odd years ago, that they were changing their U to an O for no apparent reason and that — presumably by way of celebration — their latest potion would be addressing “the seven signs of ageing”. But according to Clarins’ latest missive, there are only five signs of ageing. Which must mean that through 20 years of intensive application, expensive face creams have now completely eradicated two of the signs of ageing.

I’m going to guess that the first sign of ageing to go the way of smallpox is voting for Charlie Haughey. I’d like to think the second is referring to GPs who happen to be women as “lady doctors” while their male counterparts are simply “doctors”, but just the other day I heard a woman no older than myself claim that she had visited a “lady dentist”, so maybe that’s still something for Clarins to work on. It’s possible that the extinct second sign of ageing is writing letters on pale blue writing pads or wheeling tartan shopping trolleys large enough to house a small family behind you. If it is the latter, then I for one am sad to see it go: I was quite looking forward to cutting the ankles off teenagers on buses in my dotage as a sort of sweet revenge for the 1980s.

The five remaining signs of ageing, as if you need me to tell you, are owning gardening shoes, believing that the punishment should fit the crime, rolling your eyes when younger people use non-gender specific pronouns (if you are “down with the kids”, like me, you only imagine rolling them so that you don’t get into any trouble), believing that takeaway coffee is the reason young people can’t afford their own homes and being unable to turn on your own television.

I had initially thought the turning on the television thing might have been one of the signs face cream has cured, because I have recently “upgraded” to a new TV regime which allows me to get the whole show on the road with just a single remote control and without having to negotiate lists of baffling options with names like HDMI2. But I think now that the fundamental problem — creeping ineptitude in the face of technology — will need more than a fancy serum to wipe it out. A fortnight after the upgrade, our television stopped working — obviously — and even though I was in West Cork at the time, it fell to me to deal with it because Virgin Media doggedly refuse to talk to anyone who isn’t the account holder. I did try to explain to the technician that she’d be far better off talking to my children, who were literally staring dolefully at a blank screen while I was hiking the Old Road to Kilcrohane a couple of hundred miles away, but she was having none of it. ‘I need to talk you through some quite technical stuff,’ she said, the implication being that they wouldn’t know what she was talking about. ‘They’re adults,’ I disabused her, ‘and since they’re adults, I am quite old. Which makes me technically incompetent.’ But the woman was clearly still in the callowness of youth as she persevered, asking me tricky questions that I simply couldn’t answer, like is the box turned on?

Eventually, because she didn’t want to get fired and I didn’t want to ruin my hike, we agreed to reconvene after the bank holiday, when I could be bamboozled by the box in person. Except that I forgot that I would be in Portugal by then, and similarly unable to access the on-off switch. Back home, I explained all this to The Boy, who is growing increasingly nervous at the prospect that the television won’t be restored in time for the final day of the Premier League, and he suggested I have him on the other line when the next instalment unfolds. But I’ll be in Portugal, I reminded him, and you’ll be here.

‘You can have more than one person on a call,’ he pointed out, and even though I’ve been in conference calls and three-way meetings on my phone, I never imagined that those magic options were available to people like me. And, of course, they’re not. You’ll have to actually make the call, I told him, because I wouldn’t know where to start.

So in spite of Clarins’ bold claims, that’s surely six signs of ageing. All things considered, face creams really must try harder.