I am sure that the Plankton is a very nice lady and, that were we to sit down together in a moderately nice restaurant, we would enjoy a pretty damn good lunch. However, her blog and brief articles in The Times drive me to distraction. Look, in many ways being in your 40s and newly single is not much fun: you are less taut and smooth and gorgeous than you were in your teens and twenties; your smug married friends may at times try to make you feel like a second-class citizen, and sometimes it gets a little lonely. Life is never easy. I am sure that the Plankton’s tales of everyday middle-aged woe strike a chime with many middle-aged women. What really gets on my slightly droopy mammaries is the self-pitying ‘poor me’ sentiment behind it all.
As someone who has never been drop dead gorgeous, I have always thought that the average looking have a much easier time of it when it comes to getting older and ‘losing one’s looks’. I have never turned men’s heads (save possibly when I walked down the high street in Torquay in 1981 in a pair of luminous pink footless tights) so I don’t really mind them not swivelling in my direction now. I wouldn’t mind a relationship with a man if a decent chap came along, but the principle obstacles to that occurring are not my lowly place in the sexual feeding chain, but my own attitudes and lifestyle.
First, I have noticed that I have become increasingly fussy as I get older and less tolerant of things that annoy me. I recently dated a man who called me ‘babe’. Every time that he used the term I felt like ripping his head off. It seems to me to be unwise to proceed with a relationship with someone who drives you to distraction from the outset. Second, I’m busy, very busy. It would be absolutely fantastic if I could find someone whose busy schedule slotted into mine, but I’m a realist, I accept that that is unlikely to happen unless I make some adjustments to my life. And frankly folks, I don’t really want to do that at the moment. I don’t have much leisure time and what I do have I don’t want to spend running around trying to keep yet another person happy. I like chillaxing with my teenage children (they will kill me for saying that), having the freedom to paint my chicken house in my pyjamas without anyone telling me that I look like a mad bag lady, or to watch Downton Abbey whilst knitting an eccentric tea cosy.
My advice to the Plankton and her readers would be to stop feeling so sorry for yourselves. Nobody likes a whinger and men can sense desperation a mile off. Girls, we are supposed to be emancipated women, can’t we just get on with enjoying what we’ve got rather than listlessly yearning for some man to make our lives complete?
