Past it?

“Bottom of the fridge soup” is indefinable, something conjured up from a bendy carrot and a courgette that’s seen better days. Perhaps there’s a suspiciously soft red pepper you can chuck in too. The list of ingredients is simply what’s left over and unloved at the end of the week. Given the shifting nature of the recipe, the result is always a surprise and usually a pleasant one. Add enough oregano , a decent glug of olive oil and black pepper and how can you go wrong?  As someone who habitually ignores ‘Best before” dates on produce and hates waste, “Bottom of the Fridge soup”, crops up fairly regularly on our meal rotation.

I sometimes wonder whether human beings come with ‘Best before’ dates, they just aren’t clearly stamped. That wrinkly person was exciting, but now, not so much. A youthful David Cameron memorably captured that sentiment in his first Prime minster’s Questions back in 2005, opposite the then bespectacled Prime minster, Tony Blair.

  “I want to talk about the future. He was the future once.”

Cameron’s words were cruel but uncomfortably accurate. Having said that, fast forward twenty years and like him or not, Tony Blair is still knocking about on the world stage ( I’m tempted to continue the food analogy and mention over ripe cheese, but I’ll resist) while David Cameron is at best, marginalised if not fully cast out into the political wilderness.

The Cameron Blair example is about youthful vigour trumping age and experience but it isn’t always looks which date you. I foolishly used to wonder what the generation gap would be for people of my generation. Surely we were cool enough to be ‘down with the kids’ forever? It’s years since we abandoned fashion in our forties in exchange for a uniform of tweedy skirts and twinsets and who doesn’t enjoy a summer music festival these days? Wrong doesn’t begin to express my miscalculation. Little did I know that everything from social media and dating apps, to Taylor Swift and KPop would barrel their way into that chasm between the young and the ‘heading towards retirement crowd’ within which I now find myself jostling for space. Or Gen Z versus Gen X as the audience researchers would describe it.

While (grudgingly) accepting that the generation gap is the same vast canyon it has always been, I take some comfort from the idea that you can bluff your way to sounding vaguely culturally up to date. I try to keep up with trends even if I don’t pretend to like TayTay and I am humble enough to listen when fortunate enough to be with twenty somethings. Looks though, especially as a woman, are hard to ignore. Youth equals sexy and exciting, age equals invisible and irrelevant. Harsh but true. I had a rather rude, and I mean rude, reminder of that last week. I arrived at a drinks event not knowing many people so I struck up a conversation with another (younger) woman who was also alone. She asked what I did and when I explained she replied with, ‘How wonderful for a more mature woman.’ I was temporarily silenced and quickly ended the conversation, feeling the sting as I moved across the room. Friends and colleagues in a Whatsapp group have given me several rejoinders which I could/should have deployed; “I’m not sure what you mean, could you elaborate?” or how about “I’m a bit baffled about what you mean”, or the more direct “Sorry, could you repeat that?”  Next time eh?

But even as I smart on recalling the encounter, I realise that I quite like being older. I have watched Kris Jenner’s transformation (the Kardashian’s matriarch) with possibly more interest than someone who claims never to have watched reality tv, can justify. I used to rather like the way she looked as an attractive if obviously ‘enhanced’ woman, who wasn’t hiding her ‘older member of the family’ status, just blurring the chronology.  Then she emerged this summer, like some kind of Dorian Gray. There is now no danger of her being thrown into ‘bottom of the fridge soup.’ Apparently she told Vogue Arabia “I had a facelift about 15 years ago, so it was time for a refresh. I decided to do this facelift because I want to be the best version of myself and that makes me happy. Just because you get older, it doesn’t mean you should give up on yourself.” I can’t argue with that and her new face is very striking in a Kardashian sort of way. I’m happy she’s happy, in so far as you can be happy for someone you have never met. If I had access to the Kardashian billions would I do the same? Maybe. I’m certainly not against what beauty writers call ‘tweakments’ and it’s hard to know how it must feel to live under that much media scrutiny. She does though, set a high bar for what ‘not giving up on yourself’ means.

I am, I suppose, uncomfortable with total erasure. My wrinkling neck and ageing face are a daily reminder that my younger self had less life experience and less confidence, no stories of being thrown out of bars, of facing grief and finding joy. It’s an idea that’s expressed beautifully by the French Nobel Laureate,  Annie Ernaux. Her book, ‘The Years’ is a compelling account of the changing nature of 20th century France through the life and body of a single woman. Ernaux has argued that we remember ‘with’ our ageing bodies and not just with memory. As someone whose stomach is decorated with a lacy network of stretchmarks, earned during pregnancy, this seems like one of those self evident observations I wish I’d had the originality to make. But that makes the impulse to smooth out those markers of time (and as I’ve said, I’m not immune to the appeal of tweaks) much more disturbing. Are we erasing a fundamental part of what makes me, me and makes you, you?

That internal growth from the sheer passage of time can’t be altered by a plastic surgeon. It remains, in all its uneven and messy glory, even if the external carapace has been smoothed out. My experience of emotional ageing suggests it isn’t linear. My elderly mother now needs me to act as her protector and guardian but I think we both want to hold on to the founding bond that is as mother and child, even if the roles are increasingly reversed. The contradiction between our desire to hold on to what has been, versus our reality, is painful for both of us at times. It takes patience and grace to cope. With my own grown up children, I am sometimes bewildered by how much more they know than I do, how capable they are. Fortunately they still regularly shatter that illusion with idiotic questions about how to change a lightbulb or why boilers need to be serviced.

We can almost certainly agree that men are given much more latitude when it comes to ageing and they definitely benefit from being deemed ‘wise’ rather than ‘bossy old crone’. I include a photograph of the panel I chaired on impartiality at the Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference last week. Stewart Purvis (ex ITV and Ofcom) and Richard Ayre (ex BBC and Ofcom) definitely fall into that category of ‘older men who know stuff and people (rightly) take seriously’. Professor Stephen Cushion is an impressive and academic, who is scoring highly on his journey to ‘wise owl’ status. (Stewart Purvis’ remarks about BBC Chairman Samir Shah on the panel have been widely reported - but aren’t strictly relevant to this post). I may have felt intimidated by my panellists (I leave you to wonder if and why a small brown woman of a certain age might feel that way) but years of broadcasting have taught me that ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ is a pretty useful bit of advice.

So am I past my ‘best before’ or ‘sell by’ date? I don’t think so. But as I said at the beginning, perhaps no one can judge that for themselves  and even if someone else chooses to deliver that unpleasant verdict, it’s what’s inside that matters. Bottom of the fridge soup works because the veggies may not look their best but they’re still full of flavour.  This mature woman plans to  go on for as long as energy and life allows.

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A school friend messaged me at the weekend to express sadness at the death of Tom Stoppard. ‘Us going to see The Real Thing is still a highlight of my theatregoing life.’

I paused as I recalled our teenage trips to the theatre. We had discovered we could attend matinees for just a few quid by showing that we were students and we went to see as many productions as pocket money would allow. A close reading of Wikipedia makes me conclude we must have seen the original West End production of The Real Thing in 1982. Well there’s something to brag about. 1982 is something of a vintage year because the same friend and I saw Ella Fitzgerald at the Royal Festival Hall, with Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass. We were very young and not a little pretentious but I’m rather grateful for that now.