Real life | 18 December 2010

Deck the halls with anti-wrinkle cream. Fa-la-la-la-laaa-la-la-la-la. ’Tis the season to be racked with insecurity. Fa-la-la-la-laaa…

I don’t know why Christmas should remind us of failure and doom. It’s meant to be a celebration of the greatest beginning of all time, the birth of Jesus and the possibility of everlasting life (albeit it after death, although I’m not fussy — I’ll take everlasting life in whatever format it’s being offered). And yet all it does is make me think about how old and lonely I am. It doesn’t help that my birthday is on 1 January, or that I sat next to a famous chef at a Christmas party the other day and he guessed my age to be forty.

I have tried to rationalise this horrifying incident thus: all famous chefs are grumpy. I declared the starter to be a stuffed mushroom when in fact it was an artichoke. I couldn’t remember the name of any of his restaurants. I couldn’t describe a single thing he was famous for cooking apart from squirrel, and that turned out not to be the case. Wrong famous chef. There were myriad good reasons why this man would decide to ignore me every time I tried to make small talk. The awkwardness of the situation was compounded by the fact that the person on the other side of me was busy talking to the woman opposite me who is widely accepted to be one of the most fabulous women on the planet. I was thus marooned.

I struggled manfully to make the eating of my mushroom, sorry, artichoke, a full-time occupation that negated the need for anyone to talk to me until finally the person on the other side of me mentioned that he had a birthday coming up. More for something to say than anything else, I confided that I did, too.