Making It Up As I Go Along (33 page)

When life throws me lemons, I’m told I
should hop to it and make lemonade.

But when life throws me lemons, making lemonade
is the last thing I want to do – I just want to curl up on the couch, nursing my bloodshot
eye and sore knee from where a couple of the lemons hit me, and thinking dark thoughts about all
citrus fruits.

However, that’s regarded as very poor form
these days. The tyranny of positive thinking insists that I must instantly reconfigure every
negative into a good thing, and be able to name at least one life lesson learnt.

In fact there’s a school of thought that
says I should be actively grateful for every disaster that befalls me because they’re
opportunities for emotional and spiritual growth. And while I can see the truth of this
in
theory
, in real life it’s very different. In real life I want everything to be LATT
(lovely all the time). I want to never feel scared, jealous, angry, abandoned, overlooked,
invisible, unfulfilled, worthless … I could keep going ad infinitum.

But in modern life, there’s no room for
self-pity. To the point that I sometimes fear it’s only a matter of time before it
actually becomes illegal. Which would be a great shame, because self-pity can be a lovely
activity. For one thing, it’s free, and for another thing, it’s very enjoyable to
fling yourself on your bed and wail, ‘I’m the unluckiest person on earth!’ And
‘Sometimes I think
there’s a curse on me!’ And
‘What’s the point in bothering with
anything
because nothing ever goes
right!’

A few short years ago, the following exchange
would have been regarded as normal:

‘I hear you had your car stolen.’

‘That’s right, it was.
Bastards.’

‘Yeah, bastards.’

Nowadays, though, the conversation tends to run
along very different lines:

‘I hear you had your car stolen.’

‘That’s right, it was. But you know
what, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Now I cycle to work and apart
from the ever-present terror of being knocked down and killed – no, forget I said that,
please wipe it from your memory – I’ve never been fitter. And the exercise
endorphins are great: they just about cancel out my fear of falling under the wheels of a bus
– again, if you could delete that from your records I’d appreciate it. But yes,
everyone should have their car stolen!’

May I offer an alternative view: sometimes a
horrible experience isn’t an opportunity for growth, sometimes a horrible experience is
simply that – a horrible experience. Some things will never not be sad. No amount of
talking it up can change it, and people shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about it.
It’s hard enough to be coping with loss or shame or humiliation without being labelled a
whiner into the bargain.

A close friend was diagnosed with breast cancer
and – as is only to be expected – was plunged into profound shock. Then her
treatment started and she found it rough-going: the chemo made her as sick as a dog; everything
tasted horrible; all her hair fell out and she had no end of unexpected extras, like the fact
that her nose streamed endlessly. But when she was asked how she was
doing
and she answered honestly that she was doing quite badly, people seemed startled. Anxiously they
said, ‘But it’s given you a new-found appreciation for life, right?’ And when
she explained that, on the contrary, there was no pleasure in anything – chocolate and
coffee tasted funny, she wasn’t allowed to drink, she hated having no eyelashes –
they seemed displeased. Even more so if she tried to voice her fears of death or of terrible
pain. Instead everyone expected her to be fired up and brimming with zeal for ‘fighting
this thing’.

‘It’s exhausting enough to have
cancer,’ she told me, ‘without having to go round waving pom-poms, shouting,
“Rah, rah, rah, I’m going to kick cancer’s ass!”’

And the unspoken judgement of all of this is that
if a person doesn’t get well, they simply didn’t ‘battle’ hard enough.

Do you know the saying ‘You can’t
heal what you can’t feel’? In general I distrust aphorisms that rhyme – just
because they rhyme doesn’t make them true. (For example: ‘Analysis means
paralysis’ – actually, no. ‘Analysis’ simply
rhymes
with
‘paralysis’. And analysis can be very useful.) But I do believe that unpleasant
emotions need to be felt before they can be ‘worked through’ (awful phrase –
sorry). Healing is a process – we can’t jump straight from discovering our car has
been stolen to being delighted that we’re now a cyclist.

However, holding on to rage or bitterness
benefits no one. The Buddhists say, ‘You won’t be punished
for
your anger,
you’ll be punished
by
your anger.’ So how I do it is, I let myself be
bitter for a while, I savour it, I positively wallow in it and wish ill on whoever has hurt me.
I wake in the middle of the night to have conversations with myself in which I best my adversary
and mock them as they grovel before me. But at some stage, just before I go officially insane, I
make the decision to move on. And it doesn’t
always happen
immediately – I’m a gifted grudge-holder – and often I have to make the
decision several times before the obsession finally lifts.

A couple of weeks ago my house was burgled and
things precious to me were stolen, but the worst part was the sense of violation – that
strangers had been in my home and had been through my most private things. First I was scared,
then I was sad, then I was ENRAGED. I entertained fantasies of getting a private detective to
track down the perpetrators, then I’d hire some ‘muscle’ to kidnap them and
bring them to a deserted basement, where I’d have them tied to chairs and in a scary,
silky voice I’d ‘chat’ to them, while meaningfully fondling a pair of pliers.

It was GREAT fun for a while, then I had to stop.
I made myself focus on how horrible it must be to earn your living by breaking into other
people’s homes. I thought long and hard about it and kept thinking about it – and
now I actually feel sorry for them. Sometimes …

First published in the
Sunday Times Style
, May
2015.

Regrets are going the way of carbs – soon,
mark my words, they’ll be outlawed. Because any time some icon is asked what they regret,
they always answer, ‘Nothing. Any mistakes I made (and actually there are none) have made
me the fabulous person I am today.’

But I have millions of regrets. Millions and
millions. Big ones, small ones, mortifying ones and those really horrible peculiar little ones,
the paper cuts of shame, where the pain is disproportionately huge compared to the event itself.
Example of one: 8,000 years ago, in another life, a colleague had just come back from a holiday
in Turkey and she was radiantly aglow with the wonderful time she’d had, and next thing I
piped up, all po-faced and self-righteous and a recently signed-up member of Amnesty
International, ‘I wouldn’t go to Turkey because of their position on human
rights.’

For the love of God! Was that necessary? Was that
kind? Was it even effective? No, no, and no again. I mean, she’d gone, she was back, what
was I hoping to achieve? But my punishment is the memory of her poor shocked face, which still
triggers a full-body SOS (sweat of shame).

‘They’ say you only regret the things
you don’t do, which is total codswallop because there are no words to describe how much I
regret that time I dyed my hair blonde. (It went green. And not in a good way. And I
didn’t have any money to get it fixed, so it stayed bad-green for a very long time.) In
fact it’s safe
to say I regret every single thing I did from the
morning I turned twenty to the morning I turned thirty.

However, one of the biggest regrets
is
something I didn’t do: a newspaper editor asked me to fly to Bono’s house in the
south of France, to interview Alison Hewson (aka Mrs Bono) about her eco fashion label, Edun
– and I declined.

I know, I KNOW! But can I explain my thinking?
First of all, the words ‘fly to the south of France’ send most people into a frenzy;
it sounds WILDLY glamorous, conjuring up images of private jets and champagne and pointy cypress
trees and driving around hairpin bends in a convertible Maserati with an extremely tanned man in
aviators.

But the reality is different. Oh yes. As a
journalist, you’re given a very modest sum to cover the flight, and because I was due to
go the following day, I knew I was probably looking at a 27-hour trip via Murmansk, on
Aeroflot’s budget line, where, doubtless, seats cost extra. I’d be in the land of
sun and cypress trees for approximately three hours before leaving for my gruelling flight home.

But the awful journey was the least of my
problems. Because the next words the editor said were: ‘She says she’ll only talk
about the worthy fashion label, but push it. Keep pushing it. Keep asking questions. And have a
good look around the house.’

‘No,’ I said, very, very anxiously,
‘no. I’d be all wrong for this.’

At the best of times I’m hopeless at asking
impertinent questions, I just haven’t got the self-esteem to barrel in and demand answers.
And Mrs Bono struck me (and still does) as a very able woman. Considering how famous her husband
is, she engages with the press very much on her own terms, popping up only now and then, looking
serenely beautiful and coolly enigmatic. Her face looks entirely un-interfered with, and even
though she’s slim
and has fabulous clothes, she’s not X-ray
skinny. I bet she really
is
one of those women who eats what she wants and I bet she
never
exercises.

When I asked the editor why he’d picked me
instead of one of his usual brazen, brass-necked, shameless, door-stepping Rottweilers, he said,
‘Because you’re Irish, you’re chatty. Tell her all about your disastrous
– I mean, your … ah …
interesting
life, win her trust, and
you’ll be gabbing away together in no time.’

But I knew we wouldn’t. Mrs Bono is no
eejit and it’s no accident that she’s kept her private life very, very, very
private. A lot of work goes into staying that far below the radar and to never popping up in the
Sidebar of Shame, pictured
en famille
, wearing Mickey Mouse hats in Euro Disney.

I knew that when I arrived I’d be ushered
into a featureless cell that gave no clues whatsoever about life chez Bono – no family
photos, no smelly socks abandoned behind the telly, no evidence of a recent Pringles binge. If I
asked to use the bathroom, Mrs Bono would calmly and firmly tell me that that wouldn’t be
possible but that I could use the Ladies in the hotel down the road when I left, thus depriving
me of any opportunity to root through their bathroom cabinets and hopefully uncover all kinds of
enlightening products such as – in my wilder imaginings – Anusol (but you knew I was
going to say that). Or a little jar containing Viagra (and you knew I was going to say that
too). I’d even have been delighted with a bottle of Gaviscon. (‘Bono’s pain:
top rocker self-medicates his torment by drinking. Behind closed doors, U2 frontman regularly
sits at his kitchen table and swigs from large bottles. Of Gaviscon (aniseed flavour). Full
story on pages 4, 5, 6 and 7.’)

I knew I’d spend an hour sitting ramrod
straight, listening to reams of statistics about cotton yield in Burkina Faso, desperately
failing to find my opportunity to cut in and somehow convince Alison to trust
me and tell me EVERYTHING about being Bono’s wife.

I knew that when I left, clutching the press
release and – if I was really lucky – a dun-coloured super-worthy T-shirt, I’d
be so afraid of telling the newspaper editor that he’d paid for a wild goose chase that
when my return flight stopped off at Murmansk, I’d disembark, buy a warm hat and just
never go home.

But these days I think I should have gone. So
what if I’d left with no story? Surely, the shame and sense of failure would have died
down eventually? I’d have been in Bono’s house! I’d have met Alison Hewson,
who, like I say, strikes me as a very fabulous person.

It’d be a story for the grandkids. Assuming
I had grandkids, and that looks extremely unlikely seeing as I don’t have children. But
funnily enough, despite all the heartache my husband and I went through as we discovered
gradually that we wouldn’t be having nippers, that’s one wound that’s healed.
So I don’t regret everything. Which is just as well because, as I suspect, soon regrets
will be no more.

First published in the
Sunday Times Style
,
October 2015.

My lower back has been giving me gyp lately
– now
there’s
a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself say –
but it
has
. If I stand for too long, it starts hurting and I have to look for some
place for a quick sit-down. I’ve never known what lumbago is, but all of a sudden
I’m
interested
. Because later this year I’ll have a birthday and
it’ll be my fiftieth one.

When I mentioned it recently, my brother-in-law
Jimmy went pale and said, ‘Fifty! My God, that’s …
ancient
!’
And yes, it
is
ancient!

But Caitríona, who a) lives in New York, and
b) is glamorous, has taken a different approach and is full of talk of a big, big party. The
words ‘champagne cocktails’ have been mentioned more than once.

As for me, although I don’t want a party,
being fifty doesn’t scare me at all. I know that most people will think I’m nuts,
but for the last few birthdays – forty-eight and forty-nine – I’ve been
impatient to get to fifty. Fifty feels welcoming to me. It feels safe, like a cocoon.
‘Come on in,’ it says, ‘we’re a lot happier in here. People don’t
pester us so much. They patronize us a little, but we’re wise enough to not mind.’

By contrast I remember my twenty-fifth birthday,
when I was in the absolute horrors. I felt as old as the hills and like my glittering future was
long behind me and certainly, by all the ways we measure success in our society, I had failed.

I knew the things I
‘needed’ in order to be happy: a perfect man (good-looking but not so good-looking
that I’d be a permanent nervous wreck waiting for him to run off with someone else), a
well-paid job that involved travelling to places like New York, and a mortgage on a
one-bedroomed flat where the wardrobe door closed properly and the cutlery wasn’t plastic.
And, of course, I needed to be a size 8 – or a size 6 preferably – and to be able to
get my hair blow-dried three times a week and to buy enough shoes to qualify as an addict.

But my reality was very different. I was living
in a rented flat with two other girls. We had milk in our fridge approximately once a year. I
drank too much and spent my electricity money on lip gloss and wondered when exactly God was
going to send the right man along, because despite all the teachings of feminism, I was
convinced I’d never be happy until I had the perfect boyfriend. But as the unsuitable men
and discarded relationships mounted up, I often jerked awake in the middle of the night, my
heart pounding with fear, aware that time was racing by, that my window of opportunity was
closing and that if something didn’t happen soon, I’d be alone for ever.

My career wasn’t exactly flourishing
either. Although I had a law degree, I never did the necessary further studies to qualify as a
lawyer. (I was a top-notch self-saboteur without even knowing the phrase.)

(However, may I say that I had a gym membership
– that counted for something, right? I went to the gym an awful, awful lot. Which was
good, because I also ate an awful, awful lot. Exercise bulimia, there was another thing that I
was experiencing, without even knowing it existed.)

So there I was, on my twenty-fifth birthday,
convinced that there was a secret formula which would guarantee that I’d be
HATT (happy all the time). That was the promise of movies and ads and
magazines: get everything in place emotionally, financially and domestically, then put that
happiness in a shoebox (a nice one, Sophia Webster does lovely ones, with little grosgrain
ribbons) and put that box on a high shelf where it would never be disturbed.

Thereafter my life would flow along smoothly,
with enhanced add-ons like holidays and happy family occasions, and I’d have a lovely,
lovely time, until one day, in a faraway sunlit future, surrounded by loving friends and family,
I’d die.

But I just couldn’t find that secret
formula. I seemed to be perpetually on the outside looking in, watching as others got their
lives together. Eventually, I went to night classes to study accountancy, even though my heart
wasn’t in it, because I had to do
something.

My thirtieth birthday – a milestone –
was really quite tragic: I was alone and drinking. But within days I began, out of the blue, to
write funny little short stories. A few months later, I went into rehab and got sober.

Then all kinds of wonderful things began to
happen. I met a lovely man who was different from the poor creatures I’d tried to take
hostage in the past. I wrote a book and it was published. I wrote another book and that was
published too, and suddenly I had a career. In fact, you could say I was LTD (living the
dream).

But guess what? I wasn’t HATT! I knew
I’d been extraordinarily, bizarrely lucky but I also knew that if I didn’t work
until I dropped, both on writing books and publicizing them, I’d squander the chance
I’d been given. I was always afraid – afraid I wouldn’t be able to write
another book, afraid that it wouldn’t be as good as the previous one and all that
blah-de-blah worrying that I’m sure you’ll just dismiss as self-indulgence (I would
too, if I were you …).

I got married to my lovely
man and we hoped to have a big family – in our more delusional moments we talked about
having six nippers – but as it transpired, we weren’t able to have any. And that was
shocking and sad and put paid to any HATT-ness for a good while. But over time the grief passed,
and I saw how much love and luck I’d been given and that no one gets everything and that
I’d be happier if I focused on what I had, rather than what I hadn’t.

Then I was forty, and I’ll tell you
something: forty was great! Years forty to forty-five were
very
nice. In my constant
battle with sugar, I wielded the whip-hand and I was looking good, and when I say good, I mean,
of course,
thin
. I was more secure in my job, I took the attitude that if I did my best
that that was acceptable, and all in all, life was lovely.

Then things went a bit skaw-ways and I had a
breakdown where a powerful truth was revealed to me: it didn’t matter how hard I worked,
I’d never be HATT. Up until then, I’d been thinking of being happy as the
‘right’ way to feel – in fact, the
only
way to feel. But now, as I
near fifty, I accept that happiness is simply one of thousands of emotions any person will
experience in a life.

Another delightful side-effect of my fifty-ness
is that I’m a lot better at standing up for myself. I try to do it politely. But I do do
it. I had a recent contretemps with a young woman in a hotel when both my electronic door keys
failed and I had to traipse all the way back down to reception, where the keys were replaced
without a word of apology. ‘And you’re sorry, yes?’ I said. ‘For the
inconvenience?’ The look on her face was priceless: she was
luminous
with
shock.

Healthwise, with fish oils and yoga and whatnot,
fifty is the new twenty-nine, and this is great. But the pressure is also on to
look
youthful, and honestly, I don’t see anything wrong with looking not-young.

So what are my thoughts on
cosmetic surgery? Well, I’m not going to say, ‘Never say never,’ because for
some reason the phrase makes big smacky-rage rise in me.

I haven’t had Botox, because my face is a
bit lopsided and I depend on keeping everything animated so that people don’t notice.
Regarding Restylane, I had one disastrous go about seven years ago, where a lump, like a
baby-unicorn horn, sat between my eyebrows for three months, so I’m not doing it again.
Wrinkles-wise, my face isn’t too ravaged. This I put down to drinking two litres of waters
a day … and using
colossally
expensive skincare. Also, being tubby helps. This is
not something I’ve chosen, I’d be delighted to give ‘skinny and haggard’
a go, but despite my best efforts, I can’t shift my excess weight.

That’s another thing about being nearly
fifty – the way my metabolism has come screeching to an abrupt halt. I still exercise, but
it no longer seems to have any effect.

For all of my life, it was the size of my arse
that caused me the most hand-wringing, but in this nearly-fifty zone it’s my stomach
that’s the problem. It seems to have broken free from its moorings and there’s no
knowing how far it will roam.

I’ve been fighting it for a long time,
trying to make the clothes in the shops work for me, clothes that are catwalked by
sixteen-year-old anorexic models. But I felt increasingly exhausted and – yes –
foolish.

And I knew I’d crossed some sort of line
when I homed in on NYDJ (Not Your Daughter’s Jeans) and felt giddy with delight inside the
high-waist-banded, tummy-supported set-up.

One thing I’m
not
giving up on is
my hair: I can’t even contemplate letting the grey get a look-in. ‘They’ say
you’re supposed to lighten your hair colour as you age, but I tried it and it made me look
like I had malaria, so I went back to getting it dyed dark again.

Being fifty means that
I’m probably more than halfway through my life, but I’ve no fear of dying –
again, I know this is unusual. It’s not that I’m religious – on the contrary
– so I don’t see myself skipping around on the sunny uplands of heaven in an
afterlife that resembles
Little House on the Prairie
. Maybe gratitude for my own
mortality is one of the happy side-effects of having chronic depression – which just goes
to show that everything has a silver lining!

All in all, I can’t wait to be fifty
– although I draw the line at having a party. No one enjoys their own party: they’re
too busy trying to blend people from all the separate parts of their life and make them get
along. And to be honest, I don’t enjoy
any
party – all the screeching
‘You look fabulous!’, ‘No,
you
look fabulous!’ is
extremely
tiring.

These days, I’m getting better and better
at doing as I please, so for my half-century I’m going down the road to Pizza Express with
my nearest and dearest.

People say that living to fifty is an achievement
– but actually it’s a gift. A gift that at times I didn’t want and would have
happily left outside the local Sue Ryder shop, but a gift that I now accept graciously.

In my fifty years on the planet I’ve learnt
that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. And I’m glad I’m
here to live it.

Previously unpublished.