How to Age Disgracefully

by Clare Pooley

They didn’t use vocabulary like “egregious,” of course. Most people on the site could barely spell. She’d never seen so many misuses of “their,” “there” and “they’re.”

“We can’t change her name just to suit us,” said Lydia. “It’s not fair on the poor thing. She’s already lost her owner; we can’t take her name away from her, too.” “Women have been made to change their names to suit their husbands for centuries,” said Daphne, glaring at Lydia as if she’d personally invented the patriarchy.

She appeared to have jumped out of the frying pan of sexism and into the fire of ageism. The final frontier of isms.

Daphne was finding it difficult to take the man and his pathetic threats seriously, since he was standing in front of a large, number-themed mural, his head covering the O of the word “COUNT.”

Do you want to be an actor when you grow up?” said Art. “No, I’m going to be a bay leaf,” said Zack, confidently. “A bay leaf?” said Lydia. “That’s more an ingredient than a career, surely? Why?” “Bay leafs get to go into other people’s houses and take all their best things home with them,” said Zack. “Ah, I think you mean a bailiff, Zack,” said Lydia.

How lovely it must be to be an age at which you wanted to add quarters rather than subtract decades.

Right on cue, Tallulah appeared in the spotlight, magnificent in wings and halo. She pointed her wand at Noah—Art had tried to explain that angels didn’t have wands, but Tallulah, for whom the line between angel and fairy was somewhat blurred, had insisted—and said, “Mary, you’re going to have a baby! He’s the son of God and his name will be Jesus!” “Mary was pretty surprised to hear this,” said Art, and paused for Noah to do his surprised face, which looked a little like Munch’s The Scream. “And due to decades of Tory government austerity and the inadequacy of Universal Credit, Mary and Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem to visit the food bank.”

She needed to turn over a new leaf. Become an entirely new plant, even.

“You should wear it more often,” he’d said, before returning to his newspaper. Even Jeremy’s compliments came in the form of instructions, Lydia realized.

The strange thing about reaching your fifties is that, although your outsides might be gradually falling apart, on the inside you don’t feel any different from the way you did in your twenties. I still don’t feel like a “proper adult,” and I don’t expect that I will at seventy, either.