How Hard Can It Be?. Allison Pearson

and the white T-shirts grew sullen in the family wash.

      All successful projects begin with a stern assessment of the bottom line followed by the setting of achievable goals. With everyone still safely asleep, I lock the bathroom door, pull my nightie over my head in a single movement (‘a gesture of matchless eroticism’, a lover once called it) and examine what I see in the mirror. This is what forty-nine and a half looks like. My breasts have definitely got lower and heavier. If you were being critical (and I certainly am), they look slightly more like udders than the perky pups of yore. Actually, I got away quite lightly. Some of my friends lost theirs entirely after childbirth; their boobs inflated, but once the milk dried up they shrivelled like party balloons. Judith in my NCT group got implants after twin boys sucked her dry and her husband couldn’t bear what he charmingly called her ‘witch’s tits’. He went off with his PA anyway and Judith was left with two sacks of silicon so heavy she developed back problems. My boobs kept both their size and shape but, over the years, there’s been a palpable loss of density; it’s the difference between a perfect avocado and one that’s gone to mush in its leathery case. I guess that’s what youth means: ripeness is all.

      I shiver involuntarily. It’s freezing in here, even colder in the house than it is outside because Piotr hasn’t got around to upgrading the plumbing yet. To tell you the truth, I’m scared of what he’s going to find when he takes up the floorboards. The ancient radiator beneath the window emits a grudging amount of heat; its gurgling and plopping suggest serious digestive difficulties.

      I drape a towel around my shoulders and focus again on the body in the mirror. Legs still looking pretty good: only a touch of crêpey ruching around the knees as though someone has taken a needle and pulled a line of thread through them. Waist has thickened, which makes me more straight-up-and-down than that curvy young woman who never struggled to attract attention and who never, not for one moment, thought about the sly magic her body made to draw men to it.

      I always had slight, rather boyish hips. They wear a jacket of flesh now; I pinch it between thumb and forefinger till it hurts. That needs to go for a start. The skin below my neck and across my collarbone looks cross-hatched as though a painter has scored it with a knife. Sun damage. Nothing to be done about that – at least I don’t think there is. (‘Roy, remind me to ask Candy, she’s had every procedure known to man.’) Nor can I fix the C-section scar. It has mottled and faded with time, but the surgeon’s hasty incision – she was in a hurry to get Emily out – created a small, overhanging belly shelf which no amount of Pilates can shift. Believe me, I’ve tried. I used to be so scornful of those celebrities who combine an elective C-section with a tummy tuck. Why wouldn’t you wear your birth scars with pride? Now I’m not so sure, nor so self-righteous. The stomach itself is pretty flat, though the flesh is puckered like seersucker here and there.

      And the bottom line? I turn around and try to get a glimpse, over my shoulder, in the mirror. Well, it’s still roughly in the right place and no cellulite, but … butt butt butt. Put it this way, I won’t be taking a photo of it and sharing it with my Facebook friends.

      All of this is no surprise, no cause for shame; this is what time does to a body. So small, so mercifully infinitesimal are the changes that we barely notice, until, one day, we see ourselves in a photograph on holiday, or glimpse a reflection in a speckled mirror behind a bar and, for a split second, we think, ‘Now, who is that?’

      Certain things about ageing still have the power to shock, though. My friend Debra swears she found her first grey pubic hair the other day. Grey pubes, seriously? Uch. Mine are still dark, though definitely sparser – must we really add balding pussy to the list of menopausal mortifications? – and the hairs on my legs grow back much slower these days. Saves on waxing anyway. All the follicle activity has moved to my chin and neck where seven or eight dastardly little bristles poke through. They are as relentless as weeds. Only tweezers and eternal vigilance on my part prevent them forming a Rasputin tribute beard.

      The face. I’ve saved the face till last. The light in here is kind. Soft, sifted, southerly light from a garden that is still dreaming. Too kind for my purposes. I yank the cord on the nasty fluorescent strip above the mirror. One virtue of eyesight deteriorating with age is you can’t see yourself very well; at least that twisted old bitch, Mother Nature, got that bit right. Generally I console myself that, as everyone keeps telling me, I look young for my age. Comforting to hear when you’re thirty-nine. Not so much now I’m nearly that number which shall not be mentioned.

      Viewed in the unsparing, acid-yellow glare, my reflection reports that I have an incipient case of Muffin Chin. The jawline is a little lumpy, like cake mix before the flour’s thoroughly blended, though at least it’s not the dreaded wattles. For some masochistic reason, I Googled ‘wattle’ the other day: ‘a fleshy caruncle hanging from various parts of the head or neck in several groups of birds and mammals’. My dread is that the caruncles are coming to get me. With two thumbs, I scoop up the skin under my chin and pull it back. For a second, my younger self stares back at me: startled, wistful, pretty.

      The eye area isn’t bad at all – thank you, Sisley Global Anti-Age cream (and I never smoked, which helps) – but there are two sad-clown grooves either side of my mouth and a frown, a small but determined exclamation mark – ! – punctuating the gap between my brows. It makes me look cross. I trace the vertical wrinkles with my fingernail. You can get Botox or Restylane injected into those, can’t you? I never dared. Not that I have any ethical objection, none at all, it’s just superstition. If you look fine why get work done and run the risk of looking freakish?

      I would prefer to see a familiar, lightly creased face in the mirror than look like that actress I spotted in a café the other day. She was on TV a lot in the Seventies, starred in all the Dickens and Austen adaptations – the kind of artless, natural beauty poets compose sonnets to. I don’t know what she’s had done, but it’s as though someone tried to restore the bloom of her apple-cheeked youth and ended up making her look like she has a mouth full of Brazil nuts. Her cheeks were bulging, but unevenly, and one corner of that rosebud pout was turned down like it was trying to cry but the rest of the face wouldn’t let it. I was trying hard not to stare, but my eyes kept darting back to check out the disaster. Rubbernecking that sad rubber face. Better to stick with the face that you know than risk one that you don’t.

      I put out the cruel light and scramble into my gym stuff. Can hear Lenny whining downstairs; he knows I’m up. Need to let him out for a wee. Before going downstairs, I give the woman in the mirror one final, frank, appraising look. Not too bad, Kate, give yourself some credit, girl. There’s definitely work to be done, but we’re hanging in there. We who were once hot may yet be hot again (well, let’s aim for lukewarm and see how it goes). For now, I’ll just have to rely on concealer and foundation and hope the personal trainer can help me pass for my new age.

      6.14 am: Starting as I mean to go on, with two spoons of cider vinegar in hot water (lowers blood sugar and suppresses appetite, probably because it makes you retch). This is also a fasting day, when I am allowed a maximum of five hundred calories. So here I am preparing a sumptuous breakfast of one solitary oatcake and wondering whether to go crazy and have a teaspoon of hummus. The calorie content of the oatcake is written on the side of the box in letters so small they are only legible to tiny elves equipped with an electron microscope. How am I supposed to follow sodding Fast Diet when I can’t even read kcals? Go to fetch my reading glasses from The Place Where Reading Glasses Are Always Kept so Kate Doesn’t Forget Where Her Reading Glasses Are. Not there. (*‘Roy, are you up yet? Roy?? Where did I put my glasses? I need my glasses. Can you find me my glasses, please?’)

      No answer. Damn. Nibble small piece of oatcake and wonder if I can get away with drinking any of Emily’s green slime, the making of which has created a pile of washing-up that is filling my sink. Open the fridge and pick up various tempting items, then put them right back again. Pause by the bread bin where yesterday Richard put a crusty, Italian artisanal loaf he picked up at the Deli. Crusty Loaf, Crusty Loaf, how you call to me!

      Self-control, Kate. And lead us not into temptation and deliver us from gluten. I am meant to be exchanging the wasteland of midlife elasticated leggings and quiet despair for the waist-land