Ageing Disgracefully…
Part One –
Saturday. 06.37
You have GOT to be joking!
I stare in fascinated horror at the humungous, shimmering, perfectly poo-shaped quivering mass resting atop my right bicep. Eerily transparent, it wobbles with outer-space other worldliness in the early morning gloom. I try not to panic. It’s still coming! Squinting through the pale light that peels through the window I gasp – I haven’t got enough arm. This cannot be right.
Scrabbling under the table in the waste basket with one hand, I maintain a fixed gaze on the quivering mass and grope for anything that might feel like an inner box leaflet of instructions. I had of course discarded them with scant concern the night before. Of course I had. Why would I not immediately discard potentially critical, life-saving instructions with gay insouciance before I have a galloping clue what I’m dealing with? – (although to be fair every man I’ve ever known does, including The Egg, and why should they have a monopoly on idiocy?)
My finger continues to depress the pump. There’s no end to it – what is going on?
Hand closes on a tightly crumpled sheet of paper and I blindly unfurl it with one hand. What the hell does it say?
It says – TWO pumps. Not one, but two! What the actual ….?
I curse Wise Debs ….
—— /•/——
“You know what you need?” says Wise Debs thoughtfully, eyeballing me across the counter over our excellent Bricks & Stitches morning coffee. She expertly folds an impossibly difficult-to-fold oversized dress – (called, slightly hilariously, The Bertha! I know it’s juvenile but it still creases us every time!) – with impressive speed. “You need HRT.”
“Oh no Debs, I don’t think so” I demur, secretly committing her superbly fluent folding technique to memory – “I think that ship has sailed.”
“Not at all,” she continues enthusiastically – “works wonders for aching joints, not to mention the sleep deprivation that goes with Menopause. I’m on it – never looked back!”
“Plus it helps with ageing apparently”, adds The Beautiful Kat confidently, looking like a complete fricking angel in the dappled spring morning sun-light – “and we all need a bit of that!”
“If you look any bloody younger you’ll look about four!” I respond ever so slightly churlishly, and we all choke into our coffee.
“Will it make me look any less like a wizened old crone?” I grumble, thinking back to my attempts earlier that morning to conceal the newest of my insta-wrinkles, which have seemingly magically appeared overnight. I’m currently looking into grouting – it’s the only thing I haven’t already tried. They must surely do a line on Amazon Prime, they do everything else …
I tell you what though, they had me. I was in!
—— /•/——
Two weeks later, and post a visit to our new, young and interestingly French named – (I don’t know why but a French name always seems tres chic) – doctor, and I’m up at sparrow fart the next morning. It’s the weekend and there’s absolutely no time to lose. Here is where I turn back the clock and begin the rejuvenating treatment that every woman on the planet seems to have known about for pretty much ever. It turns out that Oestrogen is our hidden weapon and I want some of it….
Now, however, and early doors on Saturday morning its ‘sticky poo-gate’, and I’m not feeling so confident. I bravely depress the pump for the second time, as per the (freshly rediscovered) instructions.
The second fat blob slithers onto my arm, snake-like, to join the first wet mass of shivery transparent matter, and I wonder how on earth I will rub this lot in this side of Christmas?
It dribbles down my arm and between my fingers, and without much hope I start to rub …..
Part Two coming soon ….
Ruminations Of A Mad Cow