What do Jennifer Lopez, Renee Zellweger, Jennifer Aniston and Cate Blanchett have in common? Clue: it’s not that they’re all gorgeous, A-list celebrity actresses with bodies to die for. Give up? I’ll tell you. They’ve all turned fifty in 2019.
The Big Five-O
If you didn’t guess, you can be forgiven. Five plus decades never used to look like this!
Speaking as one who dreaded being forty – it took two years for me to stop pretending I was still 38 – and ran away abroad to avoid the Big 5-O, I used to assume that by the time you reached the grand half-century, it was pretty much game over. But how wrong I was.
When I was writing my latest novel, The Big Five-O, I thought a lot about what it meant to enter one’s sixth decade and came to the conclusion there are no certainties any more.
My characters are all in the closing months of being 49 but at very different phases in their lives. Charlotte is an empty-nester, Sherie has never found the right man, Fay runs her own business and purports to be happy on her own, and Roz is a single mother who has not achieved the financial security the others take for granted. But none of them consider themselves to be anywhere near “old”.
Our grandparents may have been grey-haired and in their slippers by middle-age, even our mothers had perhaps turned to the tweed skirts and sensible shoes, but us sixties babies are still working, dating, playing, exercising and aspiring to look glam. True, we may start eyeing dresses with backs and sleeves and stop declaring we’d never have ‘work done’ but keep one’s favourite botox chap on speed-dial instead, and the list of necessary appointments before a big bash may take several days – BUT we still expect to scrub up well and will glare in outrage if offered a seat on the bus.
I’m writing this with blue and pink hair colour daubed across my locks while sporting the sort of tightening, smoothing facemask that limits facial expression. (When my grandmother was my age it was Ponds cold cream and Nivea with a slash of lipstick if you were lucky.)
So yes, I still care about my appearance but not in the way I did when I was young.
I do my best to look as good as I can – for my advanced years - and then I forget it. I still carry make-up in my handbag but I rarely use it once I’ve left the house.
What I have learned to appreciate about being in my fifties is having the confidence maturity brings while still having the energy for a night on the tiles, being old enough to be thought wise (on occasion!) but young enough to kick off the heels and dance. And I no longer lie about how old I am. If sixty is the new forty then fifty is definitely a coming of age.
The Big Five-0 by Jane Wenham-Jones (HarperCollins) is published in paperback and e formats.
www.janewenham-jones.com