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.
At which point, the famous chef turned to me and, with a forcefulness that literally made the table shake, spat the word: ‘Forty?’ and made a face like Les Dawson finishing a joke about his mother-in-law.
You have to appreciate that, while I’ve put a question mark after ‘forty’, the question mark was only there in the slightest possible upward intonation of the word. In all other respects, the pronouncing of ‘forty’ was done to convey a statement of fact, rather than an inquiry. He underlined this by raising one eyebrow as if to say ‘I’ve rumbled you’ and by turning very deliberately away from me before I could answer, as if to emphasise that no further clarity on the matter of my impending decrepitude was required.
Which didn’t make much difference, because I was so shocked I couldn’t think of anything to say and just nodded my head.
The fabulous woman sitting opposite put him right. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, darrrrling, she’s not forty. Late thirties, yes?’ she said, smiling at me sweetly in an attempt to rescue what could prove to be a violent situation.
But I was utterly defeated. ‘No, he’s right,’ I told her. ‘I will soon be in my fortieth year. So forty is pretty much what I am.’
Plus it occurred to me that if I declared myself forty now, in this most traumatic of circumstances, surely the worst would be over. And I’d have a year to get used to it before I really was staring into the abyss. I felt momentarily jubilant at this sleight of hand.
All the same, I thought it prudent to visit the Estée Lauder make-up counter later, just to keep my back covered. After delivering a monologue to the sales assistant on the subject of the radical implications for my future grooming habits of a Michelin-starred chef judging me officially past it, I found myself being taken to the seat round the back of the display cabinets, the seat reserved for old people to have makeovers. I stared at its crumpled leather before collapsing into it, a broken woman, my humiliation complete.
‘Do you like your make-up subtle or sophisticated?’ she said, in that singsong voice only make-up ladies and female DJs on Magic FM have a way with.
‘Er, both, I think.’ So she put ‘nude rose’ on one cheek and ‘natural tan’ on the other, then held a mirror in front of me. I couldn’t see anything different about either cheek. ‘Would you like me to build it?’ she said, which turned out to mean ‘Would you like me to splodge make-up all over your face including in your eyeballs and up your nose?’ When she held the mirror up again I looked a bit like Chucky from Child’s Play. ‘Which do you prefer?’ she asked, after declaring the effect ‘absolutely lovely’.
I went for nude rose. I didn’t know what else to do.
Comments