How to Age Disgracefully

by Clare Pooley

When you know more about someone than they know about you, it puts you in control. And it makes you safe.

Yet, here she was, utterly alone, stalking her neighbors and talking to her plants. Except for the yucca, which she’d never entirely trusted.

The man in the mobile-phone shop wasn’t a man at all. He was very much a boy. He even had acne, including one spot with a generous head of yellow pus that was just begging to be squeezed. Daphne considered offering to help, but thought that might be overstepping the boundaries.

She had always made her gums a priority and had no intention of settling for someone who’d been lackadaisical with theirs.

How could you create a future when you had no present you enjoyed and no past you would admit to?

When she pictured scenes from the past, she felt like the Lydia she was looking at was a completely different person. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to be her.

“Where’s the fun in aging gracefully?” said Daphne. “Personally, I intend to age as disgracefully as possible.”

Daphne is a real one

But now, she was being ignored because of her age. She appeared to have jumped out of the frying pan of sexism and into the fire of ageism. The final frontier of isms.