Gravity Sucks Read online

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2007

  Text copyright © Maggie Alderson 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

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  ISBN: 978-1-74228-197-1

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have been possible without the following wonderful women. Judith Whelan. Cindy MacDonald. Deborah Cooke. Helen Long. Elaine Gowran. Roz Gatwood. Danielle Jackson. Catherine Clegg. Fenella Souter. Julie Gibbs. Jocelyn Hungerford. Fiona Inglis. Debra Billson. And two lovely men, Jim Hope and Daniel New.

  All the pieces in this book originally appeared over the past few years, as my column in Good Weekend magazine. So if my daughter appears to go from a four-year-old back to a newborn, or fashion trends and seasons seem strangely out of whack, that’s why.

  For Julie Gibbs.

  Contents

  Fade to grey

  Downward dog

  Bikini Babylon

  Fourteen

  Ageing disgracefully

  Knicker elastic

  Well worn

  Waist of space

  Letting go

  Slap and tickle

  Strangers on a train

  Foot soldiers

  Comfortably Middle-Aged

  Mini ha ha

  Revenge Wear

  Small is beautiful

  Joan Collins Fan Club

  All buttoned up

  The wardrobe diet

  Southbound breasts

  All change

  Trump tonsure

  The young

  Junk sadness

  Food scares

  Just say yes

  Plastic fantastic

  One-track mind

  Clothes horse power

  Hideous kinky

  Boot scooting

  Gloves off

  Ginger nuts

  Heels of steel

  Handbag black holes

  Family favourites

  Acting your age

  You couldn’t make it up

  Hair way to hell

  The Twenty-eight Ages of Man

  Quilt of many colours

  Rock and rule

  Closet queen

  Me Vintage

  The Swan Moment

  The God of Small Things

  True colours

  Chop wood, carry water

  Pearly queen

  Interiors monologue

  Do it yourself

  Toddler chic

  Spoiled goods

  Size matters

  Fashion physics

  Laundry love

  Revert to type

  Push out the olive boat

  Clothing compatibility

  Ageing beautifully

  White hot

  New carpet blues

  Starting over

  Style swap

  Saving string

  Getting branded

  Teenage dirtbags

  Unshopping

  Hanging out

  Thirty-five and under

  Wearing it out

  Fade to grey

  It all started with a very bad haircut. I had to do something, because I had some kind of weird post-baby hair regrowth mutation, but the cut just made it worse. I ended up with triangular hair.

  It looked seriously frumpy and no matter how many new products and styling tricks I tried on it – leave until just damp before blow-drying, blow-dry from wet with vicious strokes, scrunch dry, scrape back in Alice band, borrow wig from Joan Collins, etc – it stayed that way.

  That hairdo had about as much style and allure as a bowl of cold tofu.

  In the end it was making me so unhappy I went back for another cut, with a more senior stylist, at the same rug joint (my usual). It was a calculated risk. Losing more hair meant waiting even longer until I could grow it back into what I felt was my customary style – long, sleek layers with a hint of old slapper – but I couldn’t carry on as Emma Thompson.

  Natalie – the stylist – took one look at my hair and sucked her teeth. She couldn’t badmouth her colleague in front of me, but her face said it all: the cut was a total Barry Crocker.

  She said it was a pity there wasn’t a little more length to play with, but that we could sort it out by taking out some of the volume in the sides… Yes! Lose the isosceles – and cut out the disastrous razored layers, which bouffed up like a prize meringue no matter how hard I tried to plaster them down.

  Razoring traumatises the whole hair shaft, apparently. Which is fine if you want to look like the lead singer from The Darkness, or one of his armpits, but not if Jennifer Aniston is more your hairdo role model.

  ‘Oh, that explains it, then,’ I said, greatly relieved. ‘I haven’t been able to do a thing with all those weird flyaway bits, and I’ve always had such obedient hair.’

  And that was when Natalie launched her Scud missile. She pulled up a strand of wayward hair and rolled it between her elegant fingers, announcing: ‘Oh, no, that’s all the grey. It has a different texture. Grey hair is really wiry.’

  Wiry. Now there’s a word to conjure with in the thatch department. So my hair’s not just going greyer than John Howard’s pubes, it’s the same texture too. I felt quite cast down.

  I can still remember the day a hairdresser first told me I had grey hairs. The slow decay started round the back, so I hadn’t noticed until she kindly pointed it out.

  It was sixteen years ago, and the date is fixed in my memory because that very morning there had been a blockage in the pipe between my flat and the mains sewer. My entire floor – beechwood parquet – had been covered in an inch of raw sewage. I had run away from that catastrophe to the sanctuary of my salon, only to be told I was going grey. I shed tears.

  It’s funny how the grey hair thing really gets to me, because other signs of ageing don’t bother me at all. I’ve got perma-wrinkles round my eyes, a forehead like a saltwater croc, my breasts are sledging fast to the South Pole and the backs of my hands look like old treasure maps, and none of it bothers me. But the hair gets me down.

  I suppose it’s not the worst outcome.
Surgery isn’t necessary to hide it and I’ve got a whole battery of defences against the encroaching grey army. A very full head of highlights. Omega-3 fish oil tablets twice a day. Conditioner so rich you could pass it off as foie gras. Straightening irons. And best of all, Natalie, a brilliant cutter.

  If only she was colourblind.

  Downward dog

  I just did a yoga class with Lara Croft. Normally I do them one-on-one with my teacher (worship worship, I am not worthy), or with my best pal, but when Caroline (oh esteemed yogi master) rang and asked did I mind doing a class with X?, I said ‘Fine’, expecting another gently fading peri-menopausal gal.

  Then, as I entered the ‘shala’ (yoga language for ‘school’ – I’m getting quite fluent in Sanskrit), Caroline casually said, ‘X is great. You’ll love her. She’s a fight choreographer for films.’

  Forget downward-facing dog (a key yoga pose), I was downward-facing-hearted. And all my worst fears were realised when a piece of elastic walked in wearing a very fitted leotard and a Tom Cruise smile. Hello X.

  Furthering the seepage of my self-esteem through the soles of my feet – be they planted ever so firmly, with big toes touching and heels apart, other toes perfectly asplay – I got the mat in front of the ‘suicide mirror’, an evil object which adds twenty kilos to your weight and about ten years to your age.

  X was very nice about changing places with me.

  She then told Goddess Guru Caroline that she was a little concerned about a slight injury she had in one hand. ‘How did you do it?’ I enquired, determined to be nice.

  ‘Doing handstands in my kitchen,’ X replied, grinning winningly. She was a great girl. I hated her guts.

  Oh, I tried just to enjoy my class. I concentrated on my pranayama, the power of the breath, meditating on the exhalation like the sound of the sea in the back of the nose, or is it the throat? Whatever.

  Anyway, while marvelling at the amazing power of the out-breath to enable me to get my head just a little closer to the floor with my legs akimbo, I couldn’t help noticing that X had her entire upper body flat against it and was doing a crossword. Well, not really, but that’s how relaxed she looked.

  And, even while I gazed into infinity, as directed by Mr Iyengar, the disloyal corners of my eyes kept telling me that X was jumping between postures, as lightly as a flea, while I lumbered like a mud-stuck hippo. Also that she was totally doing the splits, while I was doing something more approaching the hokey-pokey, as I fumbled around for blocks to support my buckling limbs before collapsing backwards in a giggling heap.

  And I did giggle. I snickered right through that class. Goddess Caroline calls all the postures – the asanas – by their correct Sanskrit names, you see, so that ‘standing forward bend’ is Uttanasana, ‘plank’ is Chaturanga Dandasana and ‘supine twist’ is Supta Matsyendrasana.

  Except I have my own names for them. Bad-ass-ana. Fat-ass-ana. Shift-yo-ass-ana. I know it’s childish, but those last syllables just cry out for it. I managed to keep these little gems to myself (along with my personal favourite, ‘been-downward-facing-dog-so-long-it-feels-like-up-to-me-asana’), until I fell in a heap on the floor a second time while trying to attempt something half upside-down with one leg in the air, and loudly declared I was featuring a new pose called ‘Maggie-asana’.

  Caroline was very nice about it. I think she understood at some deep karmic level that being the naughty girl in class was the only thing keeping me going with Lara Croft at my side. Which was jolly decent of her, considering that the whole point of yoga is that – unlike ghastly aerobics classes – it’s not supposed to be competitive. It’s a private inner journey, not an exterior expression of ego. It will never be an Olympic event. If you’re doing yoga properly you shouldn’t even be aware of anyone else in the class. You should be present entirely in the moment, in a state of oneness with the universe, wholly inhabiting your breath and your body.

  Not wasting vital prana (life force) thinking how much you would rather be inhabiting the body on the mat next to you.

  Bikini Babylon

  ‘Bikinis after forty – good or bad idea?’ This was a recent coverline on one of my favourite weekly sleb trivia trash mags and I turned immediately to check it out. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind for a while and I wanted to see what they had to say about it. There were pictures of Elle, Madonna and Sadie (Frost – Jude’s ex) who are all over forty, all multiple mums, and all cavorting happily in bikinis. Elle was running in hers, but then, she would, wouldn’t she? If I had her body, I’d never wear anything but a bikini. A string.

  They all looked great and the magazine decreed that if you looked as good as they did – with fitness regimes which basically are their jobs, as opposed to needing to be fitted in around real life, like the rest of us – it was fine to wear a bikini. But real-life, normal, pudgy over-forty gals? No way.

  Then I read something else on the subject, in an interview with Liz Hurley, the owner of the body beautiful which inhabited That Versace Dress, and who has recently launched a swimwear label – and modelled for her own publicity wearing it. ‘I’m never again going to sit eating lunch on a boat in just a skimpy bikini,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel comfortable doing that any more. I know that sounds bizarre coming from a woman who’s photographed half-naked in bikinis, but I feel self-conscious posing for those pictures, and they’re all retouched anyway.’ I was gobsmacked. Impressed by her honesty about the retouching, but really astonished that she feels self-conscious in a bikini. The thing is, you see, at well over forty, I’ve recently started wearing them again.

  The last time I wore one because I meant it was over fifteen years ago. Since then, I’ve been surfside in a series of dispiriting one-pieces. Apart from one in snakeskin print, which laced up the front rather saucily, I never felt remotely excited about putting them on. They were just something to wear to avoid arrest while swimming in public places. They did the job and that was it.

  The move back towards the two-piece began with the marvellous tankini. What a brilliant invention. Tummy covered to walk about, but if you want to shine some rays on it (through sunblock, of course), you can just pull it up – after you have lain down flat. Brilliant. I even made my own. I bought a great leopard-print bikini bottom and then wore it with a plain black T-shirt bra, with a lightweight black singlet over the top.

  After a couple of summers in that rig-out, without really thinking about it, I started taking the singlet fully off to sunbake (in the shade), and then one day I found myself in the ocean without it on. My tummy hadn’t felt the caress of sea water for years and it was wonderful.

  So it was a relatively short step from that to buying an actual bikini again. And then another. And another. And mixing them up, like Kate Moss, except with saggy bosoms and flabby thighs. But the thing is, I don’t care any more. I’m over forty, I’m a mum, I’ve got a mummy tummy and I don’t give a damn.

  There is nothing more gorgeous than feeling the air, the sun and the sea on your skin and I don’t see why I should miss out on that just because I don’t confirm to our society’s ideal of beauty, ie Elle McP.

  So if anyone finds the sight of me repulsive in my weird bikini combos (it’s not just copying Kate – I’ve yet to find one that fits properly in both the top and the bottom), I have one piece of advice for them: get darker sunnies.

  Fourteen

  The age of fourteen should be stopped. It should be officially banned. It’s so unfair – on the young personages themselves and also on their parents, who have to go through a period of grief that their darling young Henry or Henrietta has been taken from them. In his/her place is suddenly a gawky weirdo whose limbs have been put on all wrong and who can’t speak in intelligible sentences. And they have spots.

  I do remember being fourteen so clearly myself. My body had declared unilateral independence and was sprouting pseudopodia in all kinds of unlikely places, apparently overnight. I was growing bosoms at an alarming rate, but the rest of me
didn’t change to match, except I was suddenly covered in a thick layer of blubber that was like wearing a diving suit all the time. I felt like such a galumpher.

  I can remember so clearly my favoured outfit of that very hot summer. I wore an ankle-length Laura Ashley skirt, with some kind of weird shirt and then a green button-through smock over the top. The smock was 100 per cent man-made fibre and really nasty in every regard, but I wore it every day because it had exactly the right effect – it hid my entire body. And the spots on my back.

  Up until that point I had been quite a normal, healthy child. I was an unbelievably fat baby, but once the overfed infant of parents who had lived through war-time rationing matured enough to run and jump and generally shake off the excess adipose, I was a svelte little thing.

  I have pictures of myself, aged about eight, jumping in and out of a swimming pool like a shiny brown seal, everything in the right place. Then suddenly I was rendered a blob. Just as suddenly a couple of years later, it all shape-shifted again and I was a bit of a slinky teenage dirtbag babe. It was just those years in the middle that were terrifying.

  Over the last few years I have watched my sister’s two daughters go through exactly the same process. Even their faces went all weird. It was quite alarming. Now both have emerged into their gorgeous swan states and are just as pretty as their childhood potential hinted they would be. It’s such a relief.

  What I have only just realised is that the terrible fourteen effect is just as bad for boys. My beloved oldest nephew is now at that awful age. Gone is the dear little fellow who used to send me his home-drawn cartoon strips, and in his place is this alien being. With a permanent cold. And an attitude.

  It could be worse – he has a really cool spiky insect hairdo, a prototype six-pack from the endless hours he spends perfecting spins, wheelies, jumps and turns on his bicycle (his fifth limb), and a CD collection that includes the complete works of Korn and Slipknot, but he’s still a tweenie geek.

  His voice has finally broken properly – he’s over the cracked violin stage – but still he’s unable to communicate in anything more sophisticated than grunts and sniggers. Trying to have a conversation with him is like listening to Beavis and Butthead on a loop tape. I still love him madly, but it will be a relief when he re-emerges in about three years as a grown-up version of the adorable little man he was at ten.