I have decided to lie about my age and eight years have gone, just like that. ”Why only eight?” asked my daughter-in-law. ”You could have got away with 10. Easily.”
But I’m satisfied with eight. It keeps me well on the sunshine side of life and somehow seems less predictable. Joan Collins would have gone for 10.
The reason I have decided to grow younger is that I am fed up with having to listen to people’s silences when they learn my true age. I can almost hear them as they do their mental arithmetic, making adjustments in order to slot me into a different timeline. Not that they will any more, now that I’m into lying.
Chatting on the phone to an old friend last week, I made a reference to when I was at university, which turned out to be a good 10 years ahead of when she was a student. The loud silence that followed told me it had happened again. I was not who she thought I was, for while she and her friends were singing Grandad, We Love You and wearing velvet outfits, I was a mother of three, banging on about CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).
”I always thought you were the same age as the rest of us,” this friend said accusingly, and I knew she too was making adjustments — and allowances. Next time we hike up the side of a mountain together, I know someone will hang back in order to make sure I’m OK.
The age thing can come at you from unexpected angles. Piled into a car, I and another group of women friends were talking away.
”Sorry to interrupt,” someone suddenly sang out from the rear seat, ”hot flush in the back” and the driver obediently opened the car window, whereupon we returned to our discussion which, as it happened, was about daughters.
”Mine’s coming to stay with me for a bit,” I said. ”How old is she?” they asked. ”Forty.” Silence rolled around the car like thunder. I had a daughter of 40? If there had been an abacus back there, the beads would have been clicking faster than knitting needles at the guillotine.
When I’m travelling, it can be as bad if not worse. Snowmobiling across the Arctic tundra, cycling through a mountain pass, checking into a budget hotel or trying to persuade some unsuspecting Bedouin to let me stay the night, I’m always — and eventually — asked my age.
As I confess to it, there is that silence again and I feel as if I’ve been stealing a tip left for a hard-working waitress. Clearly, I should be at home making jam, staring at photos of my grandchildren and going on pre-arranged holidays.
But my daughter, counting back on her fingers, is concerned: ”You’ve got younger,” she says, ”that’s fine. But where does it leave me?” I hadn’t thought of that.
According to the new calculations, I was just a schoolgirl when I gave birth. But that is not the point. The point is that I am not, any longer, prepared to endure other women’s ageism. If they thought I was the same age as they are, then I am. What’s a date got to do with whether or not I work out in the gym, have an opinion about Eminem or try to land a man they all fancy?
Not that there is any intention to mislead: I’m just trying to make life more tolerable, primarily for myself and also for those people who feel, once they have gained a bit of irrelevant information about me, that they have to readjust their mindset. Age and cunning, as someone said, will overcome youth and skill.
I know I’m breaking ranks, of course. I should be ageing with grace, whacking on the vitamin recovery mask, smoothing in the rescue cream, mainlining on KY Jelly, doing yoga, embarking on an Open University course on the Enlightenment. I should be extolling the advantages of growing old and urging everyone else to try it as well. But this is an ageist society.
When Helen John, the tireless peace campaigner and prison inmate, stood against Prime Minister Tony Blair in the last British election, how was she described by one of the local papers? As a grandmother.
Of course, I am by no means the first woman to change her age. In the 1900s, the race was on to navigate Niagara Falls by whatever method and Annie Taylor, finding her age was against her (there was an age limit of 45 for would-be record breakers), blithely down-sized from 63 to 43 and became the first person ever to do the falls — in a barrel. Compared to that, my eight years seem paltry. Maybe I’ll up the ante after all. Let’s make it 10. — Â