Now I know why so many women can’t resist plastic surgery ...
TomoRRoW, something terribly disconcerting is happening to me. even though in my head i’m convinced i’m not a day past 32, i will officially reach the grand old age of 48.
Not ancient by any stretch. But alarmingly close to 50 and a further reminder of the fact that the gap between how i think of myself and how others see me has widened to an abyss.
in my mind’s eye, i’m still a moderately attractive young woman who, with a fair wind and the right sort of lighting, might not be an entirely revolting prospect f or members of the opposite sex.
But when i look in the mirror, i am instantly disabused of any such notion.
even doing my special mirror face — the one where i raise my brows slightly and lift my chin so there’s only one of them — the person staring back at me looks less like a sex kitten and more like a rather fierce librarian.
We all have an inner age — the age we feel we are. it’s usually the point in time when we were happiest.
At 32, i had never looked or felt better. i had just met and fallen in love with my husband. We travelled the world, stayed up late, planned our future together.
ANd there have been wonderful moments since, of course. But in terms of the self, nothing quite like it — and i know i’ll never look as good as i did back then.
it’s not an easy or pleasant truth to face. Which is why, i think, some women of a certain age make complete fools of themselves around younger men.
The world champion of this is madonna, who was pictured in yesterday’s mail sexually assaulting — there’s really no other way to describe it — an unsuspecting young man (a canadian rapper called drake) at the coachella music festival in America.
Being madonna, she was clearly expecting him to reciprocate. instead, the poor fellow could not have been more horrified if it had been his own mother ramming her tongue down his throat.
Given their age difference (she is 56, he 28), it might easily have been the case.
But i guess in madonna’s poor deluded head she’s still the freshfaced girl who shot to fame three decades ago with Like A Virgin. embarrassing as she is, it’s hard not to feel a tiny bit of sympathy.
We all wish we could return to the days when we were in our prime. When men did not look straight through us in restaurants, their reptilian brains discounting us as unworthy of note. When we were not just mothers and wives — invisible to all but our loved ones.
of course, women aren’t the only ones who suffer from these feelings of disassociation.
men have them, too. But men are not judged quite so universally by their appearance.
This is why women — especially those of my age — are so desperate to do everything to halt the rot.
And why they — we — are so vulnerable to the siren call of the plastic surgeon’s knife.
When i was in my early 30s and liked what i saw in the mirror, i vowed that i would never mess with mother Nature. i would grow old with dignity and grace.
i reneged on that promise several years ago. Not to any great extent — just a bit of help with those pesky frown lines.
But though i haven’t quite booked my first facelift, i’m not discounting the possibility either.
Because, you see, growing old is a bit like giving birth. People tell you how awful it is and you can look at pictures and read about it in books. But you never really appreciate quite how hard it is until it actually happens to you.
At which time you’d do almost anything to make it stop.
IT looks like the work of a clown who quit the circus yet still yearned for the big top.
But this audacious paint job is down to Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring, a property developer.
Not surprisingly, it has outraged her neighbours in an immaculate cobbled cul-de-sac in upmarket Kensington, London.
They claim the 72-year-old ordered the red and white stripes after they objected to her plans to demolish the £15million property and rebuild it with a home including a two-storey ‘iceberg’ basement.
Saskia Moyle, 18, who lives opposite the building, said she was shocked to come home at 11.30 one night last month to find men on ladders painting the property.
She claimed they left as soon as she arrived, leaving one stripe half finished. She said: ‘It’s all a bit silly. Without sounding very pretentious it isn’t very Kensington.’
One lady living nearby said: ‘It’s ghastly, absolutely ghastly.’
A council spokesman said painting a building that is not listed does not require planning permission. He said the council had received ‘ a number of complaints’.