From the Irish Times - Hilary Fannin
Fri, Oct 19, 2012
FIFTYSOMETHING: BLESS ME, Father, for I have sinned. Last
night I ate fish and chips at midnight; worse, Father, I took pleasure in it.
Three Hail Marys and a battered Our Father isn’t going to atone for that
calorific transgression; nope, this calls for a decade of tofu burgers.
I was driving home. It had been a long day. I couldn’t remember the last time
I ate. I thought my arms were going to fall off. I was way beyond irritation;
rage and tears beckoned. I wanted to eat the steering wheel.
So much of the chat this week has been about body image. We’ve been riffling
through surveys like lovers through yellowing letters, trying to figure out
where we went wrong. We want to know why young girls won’t get into swimming
pools with their mates; we want to know why they hide in their bedrooms doing
sit-ups. We’re frowning at our midriffs in front of mirrors and asking why our
daughters are giving their dinner to the dog. And here am I, 50 bloody years of
age, and I can’t eat a bag of fish and chips without feeling like I’ve drowned a
puppy.
Recently I was parked in an industrial estate near Dublin airport, watching
swarms of teenagers being disgorged from a nightclub that was lit up like Las
Vegas; a great big neon-clad dancing queen, rocking along next to shuttered
carpet warehouses and darkened toy emporiums.
The temperature in the car park was Siberian. I had a travel mug full of
coffee in my frozen mitts. I’d meant to bring a rug. My reason for being there
was legitimate; I wasn’t flirting with pneumonia for the heck of it. I had
expected to be cold and bored; I hadn’t expected a ringside seat at a theatre of
pain. The doors of the club opened and young girls hit the night air like
mayflies in a hurricane. Shrieking with cold, they pulled their tiny Lycra
dresses down over bare, purpling legs and goose-pimpled thighs. Stumbling
forward into the wash of headlights, in heels you could abseil down, their
poker-straight hair framed blue-lipped mouths and chattering teeth.
Benign parents hopped out, opened back doors and front doors, and trembling
bundles of scrawny girlhood piled into their dark cars like kindling, screaming
for the heating to be turned up.
Meanwhile, as America’s Next Top Model is packing the Marlboro Lights and
vitamin sticks into her cabin bag and preparing to take on Britain’s Next Top
Model in a titanic clash of the rib bones, an Irish manufacturer has been
lauded, rightly, for making dolls that look like little girls rather than porn
queens. These innovative dolls are designed to resemble the children who play
with them: they have knees and tummies rather than waist-length, peroxide-
blonde hair.
This obsession with image is hardly confined to our offspring. It wasn’t off the
ground they licked it, as your granny would have said.
I dunno – maybe you have remained unscathed, maybe you hop out of bed every
morning and greet the day with a glass of buttermilk before you go blackberry
picking. Maybe you have never counted a calorie, maybe you have never wondered
if bat wings can make you fly. Me, I have grown up in the full glare of a
culture devoted to dieting and dodgy self-image. My brain is fried with the
myriad diets and exercise regimes and innovative self-tortures that have
littered the conversations I’ve had with my peers over the years. Let’s see: the
caveman diet (nuts and seeds and foraging for dead partridges); the white wine
and chicken diet (which has no effect whatsoever but was a perennial favourite
of my mother’s); all the Ketogenic diets (weight loss in exchange for
constipation, halitosis and irritability); raw veganism; sporadic fasting;
liposuction.
Sod diets. Sod being bony, weepy, elated, depressed, delirious or
deranged. Sod self-denial. Sod this insidious little worm born of fear and
vanity that tells us frailty is beautiful. I’m going back to the chipper.
© 2012 The Irish Times
Fri, Oct 19, 2012
FIFTYSOMETHING: BLESS ME, Father, for I have sinned. Last
night I ate fish and chips at midnight; worse, Father, I took pleasure in it.
Three Hail Marys and a battered Our Father isn’t going to atone for that
calorific transgression; nope, this calls for a decade of tofu burgers.
I was driving home. It had been a long day. I couldn’t remember the last time
I ate. I thought my arms were going to fall off. I was way beyond irritation;
rage and tears beckoned. I wanted to eat the steering wheel.
So much of the chat this week has been about body image. We’ve been riffling
through surveys like lovers through yellowing letters, trying to figure out
where we went wrong. We want to know why young girls won’t get into swimming
pools with their mates; we want to know why they hide in their bedrooms doing
sit-ups. We’re frowning at our midriffs in front of mirrors and asking why our
daughters are giving their dinner to the dog. And here am I, 50 bloody years of
age, and I can’t eat a bag of fish and chips without feeling like I’ve drowned a
puppy.
Recently I was parked in an industrial estate near Dublin airport, watching
swarms of teenagers being disgorged from a nightclub that was lit up like Las
Vegas; a great big neon-clad dancing queen, rocking along next to shuttered
carpet warehouses and darkened toy emporiums.
The temperature in the car park was Siberian. I had a travel mug full of
coffee in my frozen mitts. I’d meant to bring a rug. My reason for being there
was legitimate; I wasn’t flirting with pneumonia for the heck of it. I had
expected to be cold and bored; I hadn’t expected a ringside seat at a theatre of
pain. The doors of the club opened and young girls hit the night air like
mayflies in a hurricane. Shrieking with cold, they pulled their tiny Lycra
dresses down over bare, purpling legs and goose-pimpled thighs. Stumbling
forward into the wash of headlights, in heels you could abseil down, their
poker-straight hair framed blue-lipped mouths and chattering teeth.
Benign parents hopped out, opened back doors and front doors, and trembling
bundles of scrawny girlhood piled into their dark cars like kindling, screaming
for the heating to be turned up.
Meanwhile, as America’s Next Top Model is packing the Marlboro Lights and
vitamin sticks into her cabin bag and preparing to take on Britain’s Next Top
Model in a titanic clash of the rib bones, an Irish manufacturer has been
lauded, rightly, for making dolls that look like little girls rather than porn
queens. These innovative dolls are designed to resemble the children who play
with them: they have knees and tummies rather than waist-length, peroxide-
blonde hair.
This obsession with image is hardly confined to our offspring. It wasn’t off the
ground they licked it, as your granny would have said.
I dunno – maybe you have remained unscathed, maybe you hop out of bed every
morning and greet the day with a glass of buttermilk before you go blackberry
picking. Maybe you have never counted a calorie, maybe you have never wondered
if bat wings can make you fly. Me, I have grown up in the full glare of a
culture devoted to dieting and dodgy self-image. My brain is fried with the
myriad diets and exercise regimes and innovative self-tortures that have
littered the conversations I’ve had with my peers over the years. Let’s see: the
caveman diet (nuts and seeds and foraging for dead partridges); the white wine
and chicken diet (which has no effect whatsoever but was a perennial favourite
of my mother’s); all the Ketogenic diets (weight loss in exchange for
constipation, halitosis and irritability); raw veganism; sporadic fasting;
liposuction.
Sod diets. Sod being bony, weepy, elated, depressed, delirious or
deranged. Sod self-denial. Sod this insidious little worm born of fear and
vanity that tells us frailty is beautiful. I’m going back to the chipper.
© 2012 The Irish Times