41: A Difficult Birthday

As birthdays go, 40 was, surprisingly, OK. I think turning 40 is OK for most women, provided you’re vaguely “well-preserved”, simply because it sounds so definitively middle-aged you’re just pleased you don’t look like Patty Croker yet.

You take a look at yourself in the mirror, establish that your arse still sticks out above your thighs rather than dangling around your knees, your boobs aren’t golf balls in a sock but, actually, really not bad for this oh-so-very advanced age, find your stomach a lot flatter than it deserves to be, given you’re in your fifth decade, have a child, and last went to a gym during the late 1990s for about five minutes before you popped out for a fag and never came back, and go, “Woo! Yeah! I look GREAT for my age, me! FORTY! BRING IT ON!”

Then you neck half a bottle of gin in the form of expensive cocktails and start bollocking on about wisdom, maturity, self-knowledge and how you only wish you knew how beautiful you were when you were 19, and OMG OMG did you know we’re all going to die at some point? Then someone (depending on how good your friends are) either hits you over the head with a blunt instrument and chucks a blanket over you or calls a taxi.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Whatevs, I was remarkably sanguine about entering my fifth decade. What with 40 being the new 25, and all that, and what with all those women in their sixties who tell you your forties are really great, forty was fine. I’d be lying to say forty was GREAT, exactly, but I was down with forty.

When it came to age, my fortieth year passed largely in a cavalcade of smugness, helped by the Bali lifestyle. It’s extremely hard to be properly whiney when you live in a tropical climate with a garden full of fruit trees and a swimming pool, with an outstanding surfing beach on your doorstep, and when what passes for a commute tends to involve biking through ricefields, especially when you’ve spent most of your adult life in dark, chilly London and you feel like you’re on holiday the whole time.

Yes, that’s even if the water does routinely go off because you’re too cheap to buy a new water-pump, and you’d rather keep flushing the loos with swimming pool water while waiting for the guy to come and mend it for $5 than spend $200 on a new one.

Of course, one slight disadvantage of the Bali lifestyle for the more, ahem, mature woman is not only the wardrobe – it’s not unusual to socialise in a bikini and rare to socialise in more than a tank top and shorts – but that one lives surrounded by women who don’t have much to do all day but boss the staff around and keep their bodies bikini-ready.

Still, body anxieties aside, forty was… Forty was, well, fine, really. Forty was more than fine. Forty was way, WAY better than expected.

Forty-one, on the other hand, was notably less fine. You see, as you approach forty-one, the novelty of being forty kind of wears off, or at least it did for me. Quite frankly, I’d had enough of being forty, and was strongly of the opinion that this fifth decade lark could stop now, and life could go back to normal. The realisation that forty wouldn’t just bugger off to whatever hellpit it came from but would graunch inexorably, arthritically towards fifty and (eeeeeek!) beyond is one I’m still learning to cope with.

41 is, you see, a difficult birthday. You are no longer simply flirting with the exciting and novel concept of turning 40 but actually INTO YOUR FORTIES. You stop focusing on the body parts that are better than expected at this advanced age and start to realise that the slide can only be slowed with brutal exercise, surgical intervention, or both. This is also approximately when all those body-positive, age-embracing sayings you used to spout as a young, pert-breasted, wrinkle-free feminist like, “Shoot me if I ever get a boob job!” or “I’d NEVER have plastic surgery! We should all embrace ageing!” go rapidly out of the window.

Further, I was skint. Not an unusual occurrence in the grand scheme of things – the transition from carefree nomadism to a world of rent and school fees is a challenging one, even if you’re not feckless with a capital ‘F’ and cursed with a constitutional tendency to spend every invoice twice, once when you bill it and once when you get paid, like me – but being skint is something you’re supposed to grow out of, and I haven’t.

In fact, as Zac was in Australia enjoying some quality time with his dad, I was quite tempted to laugh the whole thing off, buy a bottle of something toxic and Indonesian, and spend the evening jabbing at clickbait, hating myself and sobbing quietly.

Then someone paid me. And, life looking unimaginably brighter, I rang the Bag Lady and asked if she was up for cocktails. (She’s five years older than me, though doesn’t look it, and I thought she’d be able to update me as to whether birthdays continued to be shite after 40, and whether this sort of feeling was normal for 41, which, according to her — spoiler alert! – they do, with 45 being a particular lowpoint, and, yes, it is, very.)

Bali does do wonderful sunsets, blazing streaks of sky, crashing waves, dark sand beaches so dazzling that the pools the water leaves behind sparkle like oil slicks, and this was an absolute corker.

Donning heels, shorts and tank tops (not an outfit I’d have envisaged myself wearing at 40, let alone – aarrrgggghhh! – 41 but fuck it) birthday “celebrations” commenced with sundowners at a much slicker beach bar than the usual. Bali does do wonderful sunsets, blazing streaks of sky, crashing waves, dark sand beaches so dazzling that the pools the water leaves behind sparkle like oil slicks, and this was an absolute corker.

The perfect counterpoint, in fact, to those usual 40-ish discussions, centring on which body parts are next to go, when the skin starts to go papery, and whether it really is all “ova” for the ovaries or if you could pop another one out in the next year if you really focused hard and found someone to do the honours.

Apparently, it’s the upper arms that really go next, unless you exercise like a demon, and knees. I remember when Demi Moore spent $250,000 on plastic surgery, much of it devoted to her knees, and I wondered what could possibly go wrong with a person’s knees that could require plastic surgery. And now I’m beginning to learn.

And, yes, I know that as a good feminist I shouldn’t give a monkeys about any of this, but, actually, I do. Maturity is, in my view, an over-rated virtue, I can’t find a single positive in the physical ageing process, and, while I suppose I’m against “body-shaming”, I think, in general, a 20-something size 10 body looks very much nicer than a 50-something size 18.

All of which to say is that The Bag Lady and I sit there like a pair of old witches discussing Botox, fillers and vampire facials until it’s time to head somewhere cheaper and more local while she’s notionally sober enough to drive (aka, since there’s no drink drive limit in Indonesia, can get around corners without putting the car in a ditch).

Somewhere local turns out to Old Man’s, whose happy hour is a Canggu institution, even if it does start at the ungodly hour of 5pm, and, what with it being the Easter mini-peak, it’s full of fresh flesh interesting new people, plus a bunch of knobs playing an insanely competitive game of beer pong.

The Bag Lady and I have similar “interaction” styles when out and about, which is to say that we both tend to accuse straight man who fancy us of being gay either because we don’t want to get off with them or because we do, or because we’ve drunk our bodyweight in cheap spirits and buggered our gaydar.

We’re also quite relaxed about hanging out with the youth. I mean, god, in my 20s I was hanging out with people in their 40s, so there’s nothing wrong with being on the other side of the equation now. In fact, now that I think about it, I remember being vaguely impressed by my friends in their 40s who hadn’t grown out of partying hard when I was in my 20s.

Plus – ooh! Hello! Wildly age-inappropriate and really remarkably good-looking man! Kid. Cherub. Whatever. Yay! Go me! Blimey! He’s up for it! Yikes!

And so, after a cursory squizz to establish that neither my son’s schoolfriends nor my son’s teachers are in the bar, my 41st birthday degenerates into sucking face on a dance floor, and thence to a nearby hotel room, with the Bag Lady, a cherub, his mate, whom the Bag Lady erroneously yet vocally insists is gay, and a bottle of Duty Free whisky. It’s splendidly messy – they get told off by the hotel for making too much noise – and highly entertaining.

Further, thanks to not being stuck in Lukla, I appear not to be going perimenopausally insane, which is always a plus.

Poolside at the Bag Lady’s at haggard o’clock the next morning, as I nurse a corking hangover and she nurses what turns out to be (oops!) both a hangover AND incipient dengue, we contemplate going round the corner for breakfast.

Breakfast is problematic, since her area is hipster central, which means her local caff is full of 20-year-olds with tight buns in bikinis, rather than haggard old bags with eyeliner smeared all over their faces looking twenty years older than they did the night before because, well, once you get to our advanced age smudged black eyeliner makes you look less like Edie Sedgwick and more like Baby Jane.

As I’ve remarked elsewhere, going from well-rested and made-up in low light to smeared makeup in full sunlight after limited sleep and your bodyweight in spirits can add twenty years (or more) to your age. Yep, a 40ish woman who looked 30-ish through beer goggles and good makeup can quite easily look 50-ish in the morning, while a 20ish chap will continue to look dewy, because that’s what they do. (Neither the Bag Lady or I are really sure what to do about this. Leave before dawn?! Pop into the bathroom with a vat of Touche Éclat and a trowel, then nip back to bed?!)

“Well,” I say, spritelily, emerging from the Bag Lady’s pool. “That was a turn-up for the books! I feel quite positive about myself again!”

“How old was he again? TWENTY?!” says the Bag Lady, who has spawn around that age.

“He was TWENTY-SEVEN,” I say. “That’s quite grown-up.”

“You’d have SHAGGED him if I hadn’t been there,” she says.

“And what’s wrong with THAT?!” I say.

Happy birthday to me!