It’s my wife’s 58th birthday today. And thus begins, until I catch her up in August, the near enough five-month period when I get to say, should anyone ask, and I make sure they do, that I am actually a year younger than Nicola. I don’t know why I inveigle people into asking – it never ends well for me. Unlikely toy boy that I am, people increasingly struggle to hide their surprise.
In a party chitchat context, whichever cheeky so-and-so we’ve just met will then usually say she thought Nicola was a good few years my junior. I pretend to join in the laughter while trying to view the comment as a tribute to Nicola’s radiance, vigour and all-round youthfulness, rather than a snide reference to her husband’s evident decrepitude. Try, and fail. And grind my teeth and feel resentful.
I was doing an interview the other day and the subject of the photographer’s age came up. “You’re 52?” I said. “Wow, you look a good bit younger than that.” “Thanks,” he replied. “How old are you then, Bob?” “Fifty-seven.”
Silence. More silence. We got on with the job in hand.
I mean, it wouldn’t have cost the bloke much to pretend, would it? I felt like cupping a hand to my ear and saying, “In your own time, mate, in your own time.”
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Maybe I should start wearing make-up and dyeing my hair. Say what you like about the patriarchy, one disadvantage for us blokes is that cosmetics and hair colouring for the middle-aged heterosexual male are still frowned upon. Unless you’re on the stage or the telly. Shame, because many is the morning I’d be grateful for a few layers of slap.
Not that Nicola needs any. Back when we were 18, she could still get half price on the bus, the cut-off being 14. Mind you, the downside was she couldn’t get in the pub, even when she was legal. Her niece, Cousin Izzy, 22, now has the same problem. She regularly gets refused entry to clubs, even with her impeccable (and genuine) ID. When Nicola and I got a “two together” railcard a few years ago, we could have been dad and daughter… if dad were a dangerous, elderly, scruffy fugitive being sought by the police forces of several countries, that is.
I don’t know, at the time of writing, what I’ll get Nicola for her birthday. I’ll surprise myself in the days ahead. I know what I’ll be asking for when my time comes to turn 58 this August though, and that’s a lifetime supply of my three favourite toiletry/cleaning products before their inevitable prohibition. Yep, cotton buds, kitchen roll and talcum powder – they’re all on the way out. As luck would have it, all three play a vital role in my grooming regime. Unless I lay in some serious stores soon, like those preppers with thousands of cans of beans on shelves in their cellars, I’m going to start looking even older before long.
Plastic-stemmed cotton buds are already illegal, and I reckon the paper-stemmed versions won’t stay on the right side of the law for much longer, the way the tide of history seems to be flowing against my favoured indulgences (red meat, smutty jokes, contact sports etc) at the moment. Maybe cutting off my bud supply wouldn’t be such a bad thing, seeing as my addiction to nonstop ear-cleaning rendered me as good as deaf for a month last year. I’ve been making a big effort to stay off the buds since – no Bud-oholics Anonymous; just white-knuckle waxy willpower, that’s my tactic.
Kitchen roll, my family is constantly reminding me, can’t go in the recycling bin because it’s made of stuff that’s already in the last-chance-before-landfill saloon, having already been recycled to within an inch of its useful life. Compulsive surface wiper that I am, I get through kitchen roll at a prodigious rate. It’s not unknown for me to do a whole roll, even a roll and a half in a big session, after a major kitchen spillage or cat litter incident, for instance. Sooner rather than later, though, Greta and her ilk are going to come for my K-roll.
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Lastly, I was in the chemist recently and, having had a long, hard, fruitless look, asked the assistant for some talcum powder. She looked at me as if I’d inquired after the price of smack. (Which, come to think of it, is a bad analogy, opioids being precisely what some poor souls go to our chemist to collect.) She explained they don’t stock baby powder any more after all the cancer lawsuits in the States.
Bang goes my favoured shortcut to avoid washing my trainers.
As I say, current trends are conspiring against my lifestyle in many ways. I mean, there’s even a rumour going round that fags are bad for you! And that smoking for 40 years makes you look older than you actually are! Whatever next, eh?
robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk
