normal

This is a word of which I am really wary.  

Perhaps it isn’t as brandished around as it used to be because the definitions have widened or blurred.  The dictionary suggests technical, medical, chemical and geological contexts for starters.  I have heard it applied socially to everything from oral sex to cleaning your teeth three times a day as in “But is it normal ?”   Which means “Is it OK ?”  Because of its medical context, I was careful.  A number of things taken out of medical context or in changed medical context have become unsafe not to say inflammatory.   Your normal is yours.  

I wouldn’t have started this line of thought without the last question allegedly asked of a beauty editor recently “If I don’t have money for Botox, what is the next best thing ?”  When did the use of Botox become normal ?     

A very attractive woman, right hair, trousers, jacket, makeup, stood on a corner upon which I passed . I grinned in approval and greeting.  She gave me that “oh something nasty on my shoe” look and I asked “Have you ever tried smiling ?  It is so much cheaper than Botox.”   When I told Pam the Painter who endorses my occasional asperity, she asked “ And what did she say ?”  I don’t know.  I let her get on with it.  Silly thing.

I recall explaining to my better than pretty mother 35 years ago that the reason I invested in wider ranging skincare was that pollution in the city was high. My favourite photograph of my mother shows her very attractive lines and the quality of her beautiful skin.  One did not cancel the other.  

And yes, I know some of this is the luck of the draw not to say genes, emphasised by a piece a week ago about how terrible to be 80 by a woman with a face like a boot.  You may be sure that by the time you hit 80 what you are will show on your face.

What is normal apparently is fear of age.  

But age comes.  And you can’t blame it on a political party.  Why treat the body as a piece of real estate, planning the extension to buttocks or the uplift/enlargement of bosom as once we used to save for the kitchen extension or conversion of the shed ?  And we are a lot more critical of a bad builder than a bad aestheticist. So the subtext of this is eerily to do with remaking yourself.  

I am all for making the best of what you’ve got

with diet and dietary supplements, exercise, rest (in everything from meditation to shuteye), relevant cosmetics, changing colours, getting a better haircut, realising you should never wear jeans again or those achingly badly cut shorts (all sexes).   I am not for obsessing about any of this. And although every so often there is an update on the increasing numbers of men involved in plastic surgery, they remain small compared with the number of women

Normal has shifted from “as far as we know” – what we know having exploded, often unreliably, in our lifetime to “everybody does it” which generationally reminds me of the Nazis, my first tentative grasp of a totalitarian state.

Inevitably the obsession with youth backs into the obsession with the end of youth ie age.  

I find it the last great freedom.   I can list as well as anybody else the shortfall.  I know now why people might call me a cow  – because the toenails are like hooves (cloven, I am sure).   I can’t lift this or shift that.  I have to ask for help but I have been generously, charmingly, unexpectedly, uplifted by kindness and consideration.  I was shaken to the roots of my being by illness last year – but you have to die of something.

I hope it comes fast and conclusively. I am less afraid of death than dying.   It is in the hands of the Master of the Universe and to him I give thanks for every good day, every grin and silly joke, every generosity, the birds and the beasts and a good life.  And it shows round the wrinkles and the bags into an ability to live, even in a troubled world.  What we used to call normal.