We’ve all done it. Who doesn’t wish they were slimmer, younger, smarter?
And so we put up the best pic, chin up, grey bits fluffed over, stomach skilfully hidden (although increasingly no amount of breathing in can achieve this), eyebrows raised to lift the palate.
Forty years ago, I didn’t have to do any of the above. I was slim, I had no extra chins and as for intelligence, I may have got a Tertiary Entrance score that got me into medicine but as for street smarts, I was, after all – blonde.
My former boss made reference to this often as I swanned my way around the office, chatting and making office friends. At home, I dyed my hair in rainbow stripes and waltzed around in batik-dyed caftans.
I had children fairly young, pumping four of them out in five years and so the content of my brain and my writing was really about toilet training, mushy food and pirate and princess parties.
Now apart from going to the odd grandchild party at Bounce, those days have gone. And so it is up to me to keep it relevant.
My son said I should call the column Ramblings or The Curmudgeon or something, a place where I could be a bad-tempered grandmother who complained about the younger generation, bad parking and people who don’t pull their pants up properly.
Readers, you may well receive this in spades. Certainly, I have a lot of fodder. I do after all have a husband who is a proud curmudgeon and he and his friend regularly talk about the way the world should be, especially if they were its rulers.
I think they may even twiddle their fingers in front of their faces every so often and dollar signs roll around in their eyes.
But I can also draw material from those earlier referenced children who are now aged from 41 to 36, one a potential bachelor and the others producers of various grandchildren, one starting high school next year and the two-year-old twins well on their way to becoming international terrorists.
This is a new era, a new me.
This is that person. Here we are, in fact (I use the ‘we’ in the royal sense, particularly pertaining to recent royal events). Here we are warts – and chins and all, keeping things relevant.
