GIVE ME A BREAK:Madonna is 50. Well, whoop-dee-doo. I thought she was 50 ages ago, but there you are. Every time I go into the newsagent, there she is staring at me from the cover of unsold copies of Vanity Fair (is this a sign?).
Semi-bondage gear, personality airbrushed out of existence, lusty in the manner of a suppressed housewife in costume ready for a boring night in with the seedy husband or dreaming of escape via an all-girls week in the Canaries where she's bound to get an earful from the sister-in-law between mouthfuls of something that tastes like lost youth. And in her latest billboard campaign, she looks like she's in the midst of autoerotic asphyxiation, which may be just as well before she embarrasses herself entirely.
Ageing can make you crazy. I empathise, really I do.
However.
Dear Madonna, you're making an unholy show of yourself, woman. You look like an airbrushed fantasy of a person that cannot actually exist. Stop trying to make fiftysomething look like thirtysomething. Please accept that you're old. Well, maybe not old, but older.
You see, I'm your age, darling. (Younger actually. Quite a bit younger. By months.) And I haven't the benefit of Fortune 500-class riches to spend on Botox, Restylane, stylists, plastic surgery, personal trainers, dietitians, image consultants, make-up artists, and probably half-a-dozen other kinds of professional I'm too poor even to have heard of. Yet even in my humble position as a (somewhat) average-looking 50-year-old who hasn't had anything done, I feel I have a right to say: Madonna darling, you look hideous! You're in denial! And you're making the rest of us look awful. Those of us who have to budget for lipstick and tights because we're supporting families haven't got three hours a day to spend in the gym.
I admit your figure looks good in a corset, but then that's what corsets are for. I'd probably hang around in a corset too if I had your money, but not on the cover of a magazine.
My friends are starting to spend silly money on their looks, like €17,000 for a couple of implants. Not boobs, mind you, teeth. That's how I know we're getting old.
The worst thing about having five decades on the clock isn't losing your looks. No, ma'am. The worst bit is when you realise that you're the wrong demographic entirely to be considered as a person who has her finger on the pulse. I suppose I'm quite lucky to have this column, considering, but the spectre of becoming irrelevant waits around the corner. If I were in some other sort of career, I think I might have begun to feel irrelevant already.
The only ads aimed at my age group are for wrinkle creams. Men don't look at me the way they used to and I've actually had it said to me, "Not to be ageist, but . . ." This really gets to me, because it used to be: "Not to be sexist, but . . ." I'm not a sex any more, I'm an age.
I'm breathing a sigh of relief now, because it feels good to give out, sitting in bed and writing on my laptop. You see, I struggled through work with flu last week, but by Friday I'd lost my voice, and it hasn't come back yet. Not even a whisper. I've spent the weekend in bed with Denyse Devlin's new book, If Not Now . . ., set in Morocco and the Italian lakes, and I've quite enjoyed it as an escapist read, except for the fact that the 47-year-old widow/protagonist is having this amazing love affair and every time she is gripped by passion the years fall away. By the end of the book she is going to be practically foetal.
Why is it that it's only in books that women are conveniently widowed when their children are grown and yet these women are young enough to be considered attractive and to find themselves practically stalked by Ralph Fiennes lookalikes or sexy lumberjacks who have loved them from afar for like 25 years? I'll stop complaining now.
Having no voice can be a good thing. When certain people shout at me in frustration, I can't answer back, I can only lie here with a sad look on my face. This has meant a weekend without rows, because that takes two voices at a minimum. Most of the time what I say is carefully considered, but when stressed-out I tend to blurt. Voiceless, all I can do is listen, absorbing the other person's problems with a sympathetic nod or two. My answers have to be concise enough to write on a Post-it sticker. (I think I've just discovered the secret of contented relationships.) I'm also noticing that with me silent, the time it takes for people to apologise with a sorry and a hug now averages five minutes rather than five hours.
My mother always used to say I needed to learn to keep my mouth shut. It only took half a century.
