For some reason this year I didn’t mind getting into my swimming togs. How did that happen? It did feel slightly freakish, just getting into my togs for the the first time in — count them — 29 years. Hello legs. Hello knees. I blame the yoga, which seems to help you live in what you’ve got — but maybe it is just middle age.
Oh well. The brilliant thing about middle age, I have found, is that once you don’t care too much about your own body, you are quite free to look at other people’s, which is one of my very favourite things to do.
Is this the way men feel, most of the time? It helps that the pool is very unthreatening; full of families in a holiday camp in France. Irish, British, Dutch, a few French: all the tribal stereotypes surface and recede. French women really do not have cellulite: so when they slap their children, their bottoms don’t even wobble. Is that little girl with no pants on Dutch? Yes, indeed she is.
When I am not looking after my children, or looking at my children’s beautiful little bodies, I am looking at everybody else’s body. It is not just their geometry that interests me, but how they move, the whole go of them: as if the set of someone’s shoulders or the fat on their back expressed a personality of its own.
My all-time favourite body- watching event was last year in the beautiful spa under the Hotel Gellert in Budapest, where I was in the company of many naked Hungarian women, most of whom were over the age of 60. I tell you, if flesh could talk, there would be no end of the stories held in these bellies and thighs. Besides, it made me feel so young.
It made a beautiful American girl feel horrified. She sat in her prissy costume and looked at the bulges and scars, the extreme event that is the ageing body, like she was wondering who to sue about all this. The female body is highly magnetised: it attracts and repulses. Just for a microsecond, we inhabit the other person, and know what it is like to carry all that stuff around. ”Look at me over there,” I think, ”with those terrible varicose veins.” Our eye needs a crowd — it needs to average out the extremes. The more thighs you check, the more chance you have of, someday, being able to see your own.
So, I am always more interested in women’s bodies than men’s, which is a shame, because I quite like men’s bodies. They have great legs and their chests are very amiably blank. Being Irish, I can tell an Irishman in his togs from 500 paces. What is it about them? Something about the pattern of hair, maybe, or the fact it is so seldom seen. They look peeled. I can tell from their nakedness what sort of thing they wear to work.
Do I fancy them? Not really. I am not quite sure. In all of this watching, there is no sexual certainty. A beautiful adolescent girl gives me a ferocious pang — but of what? — it somehow happens in the wrong place. Germaine Greer says that older women should allow themselves to fancy boys, but I find boys lumpish and pungent and have the strongest urge to look the other way, really, until they get themselves sorted out.
Oh no. Death. Death has turned to look at me from the edge of a family swimming pool in France. It is not that I am happy in my skin, I am dying in my skin. I am old! I run up the stairs, 12m up, to the worst, the most perpendicular water slide. I sit on the blue plastic and chaotically, in all my oldness, push myself over the lip. Because if I do not do this, I will die without ever getting anything done.
And the result? Big rip in the skin of my elbow. Four stitches. Very sexy French doctor. I mean really, really sexy. Fantastic manners. Sneaky bit of wrist hair. Lovely white coat. — Â