Glad to be grey

I saw in the paper this morning that there is a website dedicated to celebrating grey hair (www.goinggraylookinggreat.com). While this is a Good Thing, it's a pity that losing hair colour is something that needs a website to reconcile people to it. And looking at the site, it's still pretty high maintenance, with talk of highlights and different shades to soften the blow of (whisper it) getting older. It's in the interest of the cosmetics industry to hard-sell the illusion that hair colour from a bottle equals youth and beauty. In fact, everything from foundation to nail polish is marketed to sell that fantasy. Face it, we are all getting older every second of the day (unless we're dead, and there's another branch of cosmetics to deal with that). How do you want to spend those seconds as they stretch into minutes and hours? Doing something fun, something enlightening, something helpful? Or crouched over a sink squirting viscous goo into your hair and hoping you won't drip over the soft furnishings? Let alone sitting in a salon having someone else do the squirting while relieving you of a hefty sum? As I've said before, I am notoriously low maintenance. I deal with my eyebrows if they're starting to take over my face and I reach for the bleach if my facial hair starts to make me look like Peter Wyngarde, but otherwise I am much as nature intended. (Nature likes a laugh.) It never occurred to me that I should dye my hair. I've been greying since my early twenties and, yes, it shows. So what? Mind you, I'm a little put out that it's coming through in strands so I look like someone's draped tinsel over my head. I was hoping for a dramatic wing of silver, or perhaps a touch of distinction at the temples. (Have you noticed that women go grey while men become distinguished?) I know I'm odd, but I don't think getting older is something to shy away from. Age is supposed to bring wisdom. How can you advertise your sagacity if you've disguised your years with dye and surgery? So embrace your fading follicles. Grey pride starts here. And use the money you would have spent on hair dye on something worthwhile.

Mrs Worthington's lament

A few thoughts on fame, following the death of Michael Jackson. John Donne said. "Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind." Whatever your opinion of Jackson, a man has died and there are people mourning him. But, having read the retrospectives in the newspapers and watched the tributes on television, I find myself mourning his life. To take a child and take that child's innate gifts, and to mould that child into something that is a child no longer, is to condemn the adult that child becomes. What Michael Jackson became is a consequence of what happened to the child that he once was. Please, if you have children, let them find themselves before you try to push them into becoming what you want them to be.

Variations on the theme from M*A*S*H: Part one

There are two starting points for this. One is very old: Thou shalt not kill. One is more recent: human rights. It's currently legal in this country (the UK) to commit suicide. That phrase in itself is telling: suicide was decriminalised as recently as the 1960s. Assisting a suicide remains a criminal offence. There have been several high profile cases in the news recently of people who have chosen to end their lives by travelling to a Swiss clinic where they will take a carefully calculated overdose. One woman is seeking assurance that her partner will not be prosecuted for helping her end her life. If she cannot receive that assurance, it is likely that she will choose to make the journey while she is still able to, arguably shortening her life unnecessarily. Can it be right to force someone to take their life before they are truly ready? If you've notice of your own death, isn't it better to be able to face it without fear of your loved ones' prosecution? Perhaps knowing that the option is there as a last resort is enough to provide a reason to carry on in the hope that things may get better. I'm aware of the pitfalls of legalised euthanasia. That's something I'll write about another time. But we need a sensible debate about the options available to the terminally and chronically ill. It's no longer a crime to end one's life. It's time to examine whether the same should be said of loving someone enough to let them die with dignity.

Plain speaking

One of the cliches of spinsterdom is that spinsters are plain, almost by definition. In this image-obsessed world, you are not going to pull a man if you look homely, let alone like the back of a bus. I can only speak for myself here, since I haven't a handy panel of top flight spinsters to consult, but I don't much care for being pressured to look like a fashion plate. I don't think they have fashion plates any more, unless we're veering into Cath Kidston territory, but that's neither here nor there. No, one of the perks of being a professional spinster is that you can dress how you please and if you choose to go bare-faced and skip the hours in front of a mirror that's fine because no-one's going to wonder if you have an ulterior motive. I never went through the pink and sparkly girly phase when I was young. I went from cars to books quite rapidly, and the dolls I did play with were used for soap operas with long-running story arcs, rather than styling nylon hair into, well, pretty much what you started with, nylon hair not being terribly easy to style with a plastic comb larger than the subject's head. I did have a half-hearted attempt at glamour in my student days, along with one or two three-quarter-hearted attempts to throw spinsterhood aside in favour of relationships with men who, it turned out, had no interest in providing the other quarter. While the allure of looking like a woman from a Vettriano painting still lingers on in the outfits I never take out of the wardrobe, I have had to resign myself to the two facts that have led me to embrace the single life: I am plain and I have terrible taste in men. And I've realised it doesn't matter. Being pretty is all very well, but once it fades you've nowhere to go. Being plain is fine, because if you're even halfway lucky your face will gain character as you get older, etched in, unless you're going to use Botox to deny your nature. Because it's true that you get the face you deserve. It's not just getting older that frightens people into jabbing poison under the skin. It's the prospect of facing themselves once the mask of youth falls away. So why bother with make-up and all the rest of the ritual? Unless you're going to spend all day staring in a mirror, you won't see what you look like and why should it matter what other people think you look like? Feel good on the inside and never mind anyone else's opinion. By all means look after your skin, but don't abuse it in the pursuit of some unattainable airbrushed image. Life is too short to roast yourself on a sunbed. Go and do something constructive instead. Be brave. Be interesting. Be yourself.