The top of the hill

I’ve been off the booze this week, so I’ve been slowly deflating and uncranking  – it’s astonishing how much hangovers go to my joints these days. I’ve also been cutting down on tea – I swear it’s giving me arthritis, and sipping on hot toddies of apple cider vinegar and honey before bed. It’s doing the trick. My wrists, effete at the best of times and increasingly stiff from typing are clicking less insistently.

I looked in the mirror this morning and could see the barest trace of hipbone after two weeks of wardrobe limiting water retention. I’ve been avoiding white carbs a bit after a relaxed summer of sex and burgers, and it’s only today, starting to pay off.

I averted my eyes, as usual, from the flash of cellulite I saw in the mirror as I got in the bath – no worse than it was at 13 after I went on the pill for acne –  and once out, decided against shoehorning myself into skinnies and opted instead for trackie bs. I’ll change later, after a steam session at the affordable day spa at York Hall into something black and elongating: floaty on top (to hide a peachy little muffin top), with shiny, expensive heels (brought for a snip at a dress agency) and the new scarf from Tom that goes with my Urban Outfitters (off of eBay) leather jacket.

Tom’s taking me out for a late lunch somewhere smart in Soho, and a spot of Christmas browsing in Covent Garden. I’m too shop savvy to buy much though, preferring to get a semi annual haul from TK Maxx and high street cast offs  at the Roman Road market when I go to my three pound threader (thank fuck for Sarita’s) to get my eyebrows, and increasingly my chin and upper lip tamed for less than a tenner.

I know I’ve still got it, if I put in the effort, But only just. Today, I’m 33, and I feel like a war, one that I’ll be fighting for the rest of my life, is in full force.

It’s not that I mind ageing, particularly – having kids early knocked a healthy degree of vanity out of me, and although at 33, I know many will scoff at my relative youth,  I certainly feel like the last bloom is upon me that’s an uphill struggle to maintain.

It’s taking more and more effort to look presentable in public. But then I’ve always needed a degree of artifice to look my best. Bad skin means I’ve never been a wash and go beauty, so in a way, the fact that I now how a devil’s choice between spots and increasingly insistent whiskers mean I only ever had a window of six months when I had neither. Examining my face at close quarters has never been a particularly ego boosting activity, so the fact that a blackhead removing hairgrip is being replaced by a pair of Tweezers doesn’t bother me much.

I’m happy to do it with a certain amount of grace. The ten or so greys that only I can see among my mid blonde hair are easy enough to hide with a quarter head of highlights every six months topped up with vegetable dye toners in between. I’ll go lighter as I go greyer, and I hope once day to have a crowning glory as aerated as Mary Berry’s creamy coiffured puff. If only there were more glamorous ladies of a certain age on telly to which to aspire.

I’ve opted for Frownies to assuage the hereditary concentration lines etching between my eyebrows, rather than Botox  – which is too expensive in any case – and inevitably twists your face into a wind-changed grimace. I look a picture at night, if I don’t fall into bed in my makeup from twin sopherisms of exhaustion and alcohol, with a sticker on my forehead to stretch out my lines and white gloves on my hands to hold in my moisturiser over night. The effects of both these efforts are temporary, of course, but surprisingly effective, so I will continue, making my marital retreat into the spare room feel all the more necessary.

But booze – and carbs – are the killers, and increasingly I feel locked between the scylla and chabrydis of letting my hair down vs. inflammation, so I’m treading carefully to preserve the one that makes the other more possible – vanity decrees it’s harder to enjoy myself when I feel bloated and puffy.

I get my kicks in increasingly gentle ways. Staying up all night has long lost its appeal despite the post kids kickback and I’m finding pleasure in staying in, and being well. I feel increasingly the compulsion to test myself, now the day to day constraints of childrearing are gradually releasing their shackles. I auditioned for a play this week having not acted since university, and as a half term break, I’ve opted for the challenge of driving to the French Alps for a ski trip with the kids to revisit my nascent skills – I only learned last Christmas having broken my nose on the dry slopes as a teen. But it seems the real thrill of learning something a little bit scary is of more value to us all than taking the easy, lazy way to showing them a good time – by exposing them to the saccharine, gratuitously overpriced – and apparently exploitative – thrills of Disneyland Paris.

I also feel increasingly confident in my work. I’m beginning to consider more freelancing, and new pitches with a growing platform for saying what I think about the world. And though my relationship with Tom is not what is was, it’s not worse for it, as we learn to accommodate each other’s proclivities and keep working together for a shared future, whatever that may be. But  the future’s not so scary once you’ve hit the top of the hill – the view seems, if anything, quite positive.

Yet, the insistent nag from my ovaries, made worse by the shiny faces of my children giggling as they joined me under the covers this morning with so much love and a crazy pug card, makes me hesitate from feeling too pleased with myself and too settled. It’s the kids, above all,  who keep me grounded, keep me going, for all they may hold me up and get under my feet. But I have time, a little time, on my side, and I’m grateful for that.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland with Sam, for a decadent, responsibility free day, a treat which has been rare in the last eight years – except that John Milton, our dour baby pug has a lump on his eyebrow, which could be a tumour, so we’re going to the vet first. But he’s too young for it to be anything serious surely?  But that’s the gamble. Whatever you can see from the top of the hill, you just never know what may be around the corner, making the agony of indecision feel all the more potent, but impelling you to make the most of the moments when everything seems to be going just fine.