It would have been my mother’s 84th birthday on 29 May. I thought about her as I clattered down the corkscrew stairs at Holland Park Underground Station, past the prissy sign warning travellers not to attempt the stairs because there were 93 of them, instead of encouraging people to use them as I would if I were in charge around here.
On the platform, in the soupy tunnel, I took out my iPhone to play my little game, which is to do the Wordle before the next train arrives, which – thanks to the Central Line’s rapid peristalsis – is usually only a couple of minutes. Mission accomplished, I got onto a standing-room-only carriage.
My mother died in 2021, aged 79. It was her time. But now she’s away – that tender Irish way of saying someone has died – I still miss her every day. I reminded myself of the vow I made to myself: I’d pack every minute of my remaining portion with action and incident since she couldn’t – in short, I’d live my Best Life, in her honour.
I was leaning against the glass partition, reading X on my phone, when I heard the voice. It was polite, asking someone if they needed a seat. I continued reading my phone as it couldn’t possibly be me in my denim skirt and sneakers, sending ideas to my producer. Then the voice came again, same question: ‘Excuse me, do you want to sit down?’ I looked up and my eyes locked with a man in jeans to my right, in the Schuss position over the blue-patterned plush. He was hovering, uncertain as to whether to plant his rear back down, gesturing to his seat… and looking back at me.
Instead of thanking him and moving down the carriage to take the seat, like a normal person, I shook my head in confused horror, and muttered, ‘No, thank you, I’m fine’ – but in truth I was shook. Shookest. There was no way this kind man could have thought I was pregnant, a mutilée de guerre as on the Paris Metro, or disabled (I think). There was only one construction I could place on his offer.
He thought I was old. Not someone who plays tennis three times a week. Who lifts weights. Who walks everywhere. Who always takes the stairs. Who thinks that – or used to think – she didn’t look her chronological age yet (I was born in September 1965) and indeed who’d been told not so long ago that my ‘biological age’ was only 35. I was at this German white-coat establishment (for Tatler, I think), a hybrid of hospital and spa, where punters shell out thousands of pounds for a concentration camp diet of hard tack and watery broth, and have biomedical assessments and scans to distract from the hunger. I was quietly chuffed about this until the comedian and writer Ruby Wax, who was on her ‘wellness journey’ there too, revealed she’d been told she was only 35, too. Ruby was born in 1953.
I’ve stopped telling people about my first time (that someone offered me their seat on the Underground, that is) because it has not met with the response I’d hoped for, i.e. gasps and protestations that I’m the last person who looks like they need a seat on a hot Tube, or who can’t stand for seven whole minutes until Tottenham Court Road.
‘Hahahahaha!’ went my husband, for example. His mood was further improved when we were buying tickets to visit the Ulster Folk Museum last weekend. He was examining the list of prices outside this unmissable attraction (Adults £12.50; Child £7.80; Senior £9.75; Family of three, £26.50; Family of four, £30.75; Family of five, £36.50). He enquired how old you had to be to be eligible for the senior discount. ‘Sixty,’ the woman at the ticket desk said. ‘Well, two seniors then, please,’ Ivo said, almost unable to contain his joy, and then watched as the woman glanced at me, issued the tickets and handed them over.
Any last faint hopes of being more stunna than Stannah died that day
‘See,’ he said, handing me mine and chuckling with satisfaction. ‘Didn’t bat an eyelid. She didn’t ask to see your passport or proof of age or anything.’ Any last faint hopes of being more stunna than Stannah died that day.
There’s no getting round it. ‘When you’re 60,’ as Mariella Frostrup told me, ‘you can’t spin it any more.’
In the absence of my mother, the only person who could have spun it for me at this point, I applied to another maternal figure in my life. Elizabeth is a wonderful Irish woman in her eighties who gives me my fortnightly vitamin injections, including a shot of something that’s banned in the US called Gerovital. ‘Do I really look like I can’t stand up for very long?’ I asked, as I lay on the bed face down. ‘Do I, Elizabeth?’ I mumbled into the white paper coverlet.
‘No, he gave you his seat because you’re a lady, you’re a lady,’ she repeated, with infectious fervour. ‘So don’t you be taking that to heart, now.’
She swabbed me with a wipe and stung my buttock with the needle.
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