BLOG 104: BRING IT ON!!!!

“Men get distinguished with age – women get extinguished with age” My grandmother (born 1914)

Oh hell, stop the rejoicing about being fabulous for your age… my Granny’s statement is as true as it ever was. Women still don’t age well. There are still landmark birthdays that say... GAME OVER!

Forty used to be the big one… the one where nature wins… where you are frankly too exhausted to hold in your belly, where gravity takes it toll, where jowls develop and bingo wings magically appear every time you put on a bra. Forty meant that your days of sleeveless frocks were over.

Forty used to mean a sweet tooth would develop just as your libido shrivels and the delights of chocolate seem more certain than the delights of a roll in the hay.

Forty used to mean elasticated waists on trousers – that sweet tooth meaning that lurid indentations would print across your now plus size belly should you attempt to squash yourselves into jeans.

Forty used to mean big. It was the Big Four Ohno. What ever life was left would bear no relation to what had past… everything would now be big…big knickers, big wrinkles, big fat grey hairs.

If life began at forty for most women… it was a very different life from what they had enjoyed up to 39.

Then it changed.

Suddenly forty bumped into the word fabulous… and thought that they’d hang out for a while.

In 1997 the girl who not yet 20 when she married David Bailey turned 40. The world went into shock… she was 40… but wait for it… she was a fox! Sure she didn’t look like her 20 year old self… but she sure didn’t look like what we’d all been lead to believe forty unequivocally had to look like. In fact Marie Helvin looked so good she put girls half her age to shame.

Forty something women sat up took note. For most women it seems that one minute you are impatiently wondering if your teens will ever end and the next you are counting down to the end of your twenties. Your thirties (which really should be the best decade of self awareness) gets completely nuked by your off-spring and it is just a HUGE surprise that suddenly you are forty… you quite literally were so busy living your life… you kind of missed it. It was a wonderful thing that thanks to Ms Helvin et al every woman got thrown an extra decade.

This time, women were gonna do it for themselves. They were going to be forty. Not much they could do about that. But thanks to Ms Helvin …they were going to be fabulous.

By the Noughties they were EVERYWHERE.

Suddenly you could move without being confronted with another hot forty something…. Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, Madonna , Jamie Lee Curtis, Siobhan Fahey, Andi MacDowell, Sade Adu, Holly Hunter… the list went on… and on. None of these women still looked twenty, but they had redefined the big four ohno into something else. They looked beautiful, confident, complete and absolutely enjoying the sexiness that only comes with knowing. Suddenly it was Big and clever to be Four-OH!

Well that was then and this is now… some 13 years on since the world woke up to the fact that looking hot, being hot and living hot was still open to women who previously were only getting hot if the menopause was kicking in.

But wait Jax… didn’t you say STOP the rejoicing? What on earth is up with women looking and feeling fabulous in their middle years? Why on earth should they STOP rejoicing that it’s no longer ‘game over’ at 39 years 365 days?

Glad you asked……I shall you for why.

Years pass too quickly. (Any one who has kids will tell you that… one minute you are wondering if they’ll ever get out the crawling stage and walk… and it seems twenty minutes later they are crawling hands and knees up the stairs at 3am after walking home from a night club.) And yes I get it that forty comes a little too soon for most of us. And yes it was wonderful to not be evicted from the mainstream just because time moved on.

But.

Remember that honour role of the original fabulous forties?

Well each and every one of them is now in her fifties.

And you know what?

They STILL look fabulous. And each is chanting “50 is the new 30”.

And you know what… speaking as one who is soon to join them at that landmark… I’m vaguely disappointed.

Because frankly. I’m done with being thirty. Twenty years after that landmark, half a century after being born… wouldn’t it be nice to move on to a new stage now?

I’m done with worrying about my midriff. Just because one of today’s teenagers actually used to live there doesn’t mean you can’t still have the belly of a teenager. No one needs to be stretched and distended through child bearing anymore! BUT what about the fact we are PROUD of having done this? Actually… what is so wrong with having a body that reveals a little of its history?

I’m done with worrying about grey hairs. Andi MacDowell seems to be permanently on my TV screen informing me that the product she endorses covers all greys. No need to have iron grey hair anymore! BUT what about the fact that I’m rather annoyed with the whole chemical process (read Blog 34 on the bad things that happened when I dyed my hair). Actually… what is so wrong with distinguished trails of silver anyway?

I’m done with worrying about the structural changes to my face. The only changes one can embrace are the ones that take you through from baby to teen, teen to young adult, and young adult to grown up. BUT what about the fact I’m not alarmed that my face will change again? Actually… what is so wrong with embracing the fact that your grown-up face will morph into your elderly face?

I’m done with worrying about the tops of my arms. Oh this one is aimed at YOU Mrs Obama! There is no need to slip into an age appropriate sleeve now -we all can be toned to the pit. Strappy tops for all!!! Actually… what is wrong about bowing out graceful after allowing the world four decades of staring into your armpits?

I’m not saying that I want to become an old hag. What I am saying is that I am rather disappointed that the fabulous forties role models didn’t choose to embrace the next stage. They look as if they rather got stuck. If you take a look at the male equivalents, they seem to have become almost regal as they wear their years with pride.

I realise that men by and large do not have the same issues with ageing. “They get distinguished with age – women get extinguished with age”, or so my grandmother said. But I have come to believe that whilst that was true of my grandmothers generation (no disrespect but she looked like a crone in her 60’s whereas my mother looked lovely)…times have changed. Women can now look beautiful when they embrace their age. (If you doubt me check out Helen Mirren… now THAT is how you do age embrace).

To be hot in your thirties is thrilling. To be still thought of as hot in forties is…quite rightly fabulous.

But I’m not sure I’m looking forward to my fifties being my ‘new thirties’.

Because if truth be told….Thing is I’m done with being hot.

I’ve done hot.

I’m ready for something else now.

And whilst I’m writing this from the comfort of my fabulous forties, I feel sure that when fifty does come a knocking I’ll be ready.

I’m proud to have been born in the sixties, to have seen that amazing decade through the eyes of a child. I’m ecstatic to have been affected by punk in the summer of 1977 and seen my suburban teen world rocked on its axis. I’m so honoured to have spent a large chunk of my early adult years in the 80’s, it was a singular capsule of time the like of which we will never see again. I can’t celebrate the Cool Britannia vibe of the 1990’s enough, it was the perfect end to an amazing century. To have been experienced with life as a new century dawned gave me unique vantage point in the Noughties. This current still unnamed decade never fails to surprise, infuriate and delight me and again I genuinely feel that I would like to be at no other point in my life to experience it.

I do not wish to be taken for someone who missed out on one moment of any of that. I have no need of a “new thirty”.

When fifty comes a knocking - I’d have had half a century of doing amazing stuff. And I’ll have stories to tell. I’ve been there and I’ve done that, and I’ve stared in the DVD and I’d like to look like the person who should get full credit for it!

If you enjoyed this blog and you want to contact Jax or find out more about JaxWorld blog please log onto: http://thejaxworldblog.vpweb.co.uk/

Thanks for voting for JaxWorld as the Best Blog about Stuff in the 2009 Blogger Choice Awards and for all your support that has made this blog such a success.

BLOG 103: CLIMATE CHANGE

“Travelling is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” John Steinbeck -Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist

This week the main chatter has been about how our right to jump on planes to far flung places has been interfered with by the powers that be who stopped all flights from and through Northern European airspace due to volcanic activity in Iceland.

One of my dear friends has aptly pointed out that it really was not that long ago that air travel was the remit of a select few and that she was unaware that air travel had been upgraded from a luxury to a right!

Of course this a very important point. But judging by the way that we Brit’s have whinged this week, the most important thing to us is certainly not climate change effecting volcanic action, but our right to change climate at whim. (And damn the co2 we pour into the atmosphere from the planes that make this all possible).

Of course climate change is nothing new.

When I was a child, our vacations were built around climate change.

We would decamp from London to a cottage in the Lake or Peak District (or God help us all the West Country) and conduct the most extreme climate changes known to man kind:

We would get up in a ill heated/ventilated rented holiday home, go out for a walk through the countryside, get extremely cold, come back in again, chuck wood on the fire, drink beefy bovil, get extremely hot and then go out for another walk. Our holidays were devised to give us nothing more than dramatic changes in body temperature! That was climate change in the 70’s!

We used to do a lot of walking. Being city kids, I suppose my parents thought the country air would be good for us. Stopping off for a well earned break in gingham table clothed tea shops punctuated the week. There was also a lot of sightseeing, which usually involved places where dead monarchs or artistes used to live. Towards the end of the holiday, we kids were allowed the one thing we’d nagged all week for…. To go to the arcade. I think after a week of dragging three decidedly under impressed kids around castles, monasteries and national parks – they needed the break as much as we did.

In this pleasure palace we were dazzled with not much more than rows of slot machines, shooting galleries and in its own special room… BINGO! Rows and rows of seats with a brightly coloured board before each one. You had to slide the little doors on the board closed as the bingo caller yelped out the numbers. The prizes were always crap and yet I recall being very jealous indeed when my sister won a plastic cow (coated in genuine felt as fur). Las Vegas it was not.

We didn’t really eat out. Holiday meals were served much as they were at home – rustled up in the kitchen and served at the table. The only eating out we ever really did on holiday was to have a picnic.

Picnics on seaside breaks were my favourite. We’d awake in afore mentioned ill heated/ventilated rented holiday home, peer through the net curtains at the sky (always blue before 10am), and waste the two hours of guaranteed sunshine (always clouds after 12pm) packing a picnic and flasks of beefy Bovril (just in case). We’d then get in the car, drive down to the beach, watch Dad try to erect windbreaks in a force 10 gale, then hunker down behind it and eat sandwiches which always seemed to acquire a light dusting of sand. When the monsoon started we’d retire to the car and sit drinking beefy Bovril while Mum or Dad would look optimistically out the window. They’d take it in turns to say “Oooh I think it’s brightening up”… Lord alone knows what sky they were looking at.

There must have been sunny days during our many years of holidays to Wales, Northern, Western and Eastern England. The met office figures for those years show summers with temperatures we seldom see today… proper “PHEW! What a Scorcher” weather. But funny enough in total contradiction of the cliché that childhood memories are always bathed in golden sunshine – mine (though affectionately remembered) are of cardigans being pulled tight against the cold and of rainy seascapes through steamy car windows.

It was no surprise that we Brits embraced the advent of cheap air travel with such gusto. It was just too dazzling a thought to be able to be somewhere with consistent sunshine within 2hrs. (Especially when it used to take us practically all day to drive up to the rainy lakes).

My first proper European holiday (we still said ‘on the contentment’ then) was to Majorca. Playa de Palma.

I don’t recall being over awed with the air travel, but I must have been as I still have the in flight magazine all these decades later! The airline was Dan Air. The plane was very old, very cramped and very noisy. You kind of knew it was 2^nd or 3^rd hand. Everyone chain smoked for the whole flight and the cabin staff were probably the most friendly I’ve ever encountered. But back then being an air hostess was perceived to be a very glamorous job so they had every reason to be happy with their lot.

Mass Tourism was just beginning, so Spain had not yet totally given over to duplicating English life in the sun. The Spanish habit of the paseo was much copied by us Brits … The Spanish Early Evening Stroll. So this was kind of what we did every evening. All that walking reminded me of my English holidays! In fact there was much to remind me of the UK. I remember my first impression of our hotel complex was that it looked like one of our local sink estates – but with towels hanging out instead of laundry!

But there was something that didn’t remind me of the UK at all. It was winter and it was warm. It was warm every day. It was warm every evening. There was no need for beefy Bovril to warm me up.

It was clear though… even back then… that I would not choose to rent a cottage in the countryside or the seaside in the UK over the choice of feeling warm…every day, every night…guaranteed.

My tastes have developed and the distances I have travelled to vacation have developed too. I am responsible as any of us (probably more than most) for that great big carbon footprint that is bothering mother nature at the moment. I understand that mother nature is mighty angry right now and setting off volcanoes in Northern Europe is just a little of her rage at the problems I have helped cause with my pursuit of what is not mine by geography.

My dear friend is right…it’s not our right to jet off to sunny climes. What we should all be noting is that the lack of flights in Europe saved 206,465 tons of co2 from pumping into the atmosphere daily. We should be hearing what mother nature’s message says.

Climate change is serious. But damn it… I was as happy as anyone that the big birds are back in the sky mainly and selfishly I guess cause I just can’t see myself doing climate change 1970’s style!

If you enjoyed this blog and you want to contact Jax or find out more about JaxWorld blog please log onto: http://thejaxworldblog.vpweb.co.uk/

Thanks for voting for JaxWorld as the Best Blog about Stuff in the 2009 Blogger Choice Awards and for all your support that has made this blog such a success.

BLOG 102: BIG MOUTH strikes again...

"Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare." GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Irish Dramatist

Ahhhh... the lyrical tongue of Ireland's greatest... Mr Shaw. He was so accurate when he noted that very few people think for themselves more than say two or three times a year which was the gift that allowed him to make an international reputation for himself by thinking once or twice a week It is a cause of much amazement to me how most people are not able to process a thought and arrive at a conclusion and how it is that they depend on the likes of the loquacious to give them an opinion.

I am amazed, but eternally grateful... In much the same way I suspect that a plumber is grateful for the fact most of us do not know how to tighten a washer in a tap. It feels bogus on some deeper level to relieve people of money for something that comes so easily... but on the other hand people will pay to have a bone-fide need sated.

As a writer I live in the most illiterate age… never have more people who are able to read not pick up a book… however never before has a writer had so many mediums in which to be read.

Unlike poor Will Shakespeare or even dare I say it Mr Shaw… I have endless demand for my scribbles from sources unavailable to the great scribes. (UNFAIR I know). But somehow despite no one reading books, there is a desperate need for someone to write… Newspapers need people to write to tell us what to think, magazines need people to write to tell us what to aspire to, social networking sites need people to write to tell us what to care about, radio need lyrists to write the words of the ditties we parrot all day and TV needs people to write scripts that show us how stupid everyone else is.

It is slightly worrying that writers – once a maligned breed to weirdos who think too much - now have their every word given a focus unique attention. Of course a multi media stage means that celebrity for a writer is now a rarity, Shakespeare and Shaw would have to work much harder today to gain the attention they received in their lifetimes. But none the less, the multi media stage has given a writer more power than Mr Shakespeare and Mr Shaw could have ever imagined.

It seems to concern few that such power is in the hands of those blessed few who are able to play with words to capsule an emotion you probably would have never felt if we have not told you to.

In my life time I’ve been told that brown is the new black, that I should ‘house-doctor’ my home before I sell it, that there are 7 signs of ageing, that Abba were good, that Bingo is young and sexy as are Vampires, that Janice Dickenson was the original supermodel, Katie Price is a brilliant Business Woman finding markets where no one thought there could be, that love is all you need, that add the word NEW in front of anything and the past doesn’t exist, that gardening is an art form, that if something is worthy someone will hold a concert for it, that greed is good and above all…I’m worth it.

Of course none of the above is true…

Black is Black. Houses sold before they started painting everything magnolia. There are zillions signs of ageing. Abba were never popular before their renaissance. Bingo is for retired women. Vampires are middle aged mid European aristocrats. Janice Dickenson is her own creation. Katie Price has made over 30 million by aiming for the lowest common denominator – neither the first nor the last to think of that. Love unaccompanied by status and compatibility will not cover anyone’s needs for long. Worth is identified by meaningfulness and merit and not by the attentions of Bono, Geldof, Clooney or Wyclef Jean. And I’m sorry L’Oreal… it’s just a beauty product.

But someone wrote that it was.

• So you bought more brown and figured it’d be useful.
• You made your house neutral so attract more buyers.
• You don’t worry about mortality… just the 7 separate signs that you ain’t 21 no more!
• You have false memories of Abba being mobbed in the streets.
• You think of Bingo as completely revamped (even though you know no one under 50 who will admit to have ever been)
• You run out and buy the whole Twilight series and notify Amazon you need the Sookie Stackhouse series and the Riley Jenson Guardian series STAT!
• You have false memories of Janice Dickenson on billboards everywhere.
• You feel that Katie Price ‘s 23 books, perfume, electrical products and glamour posters have left you cold BUT she has filled your need for equestrian clothes, mainly in pink, underwear, mainly in pink, and are currently popping into Matalan to get some bedlinen from her range, which are, unsurprisingly, mostly pink.
• You start to believe that you could lose it all… but not the lurve.
• You believe charity does beginning at home… when you see the telethon
• Your bathroom is a testament to the worlds biggest beauty company Headquartered in the Paris suburb of Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France.

And all because someone wrote that somewhere the words the told you that you should.

But have no fear… we’re all not just a load of puppets being manipulated.

The words keep coming, this is true. The words keep telling us what to do… and you know why?

It has to be repeated because despite the barrage of words from the internet, the television, the radio, the newspapers, the magazines and a zillion other sources…we have the pub to give us a place to erase it all.

If you enjoyed this blog and you want to contact Jax or find out more about JaxWorld blog please log onto: http://thejaxworldblog.vpweb.co.uk/

Thanks for voting for JaxWorld as the Best Blog about Stuff in the 2009 Blogger Choice Awards and for all your support that has made this blog such a success.

BLOG 101: English Heritage

“The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, side-stepping responsibility, and pushing their luck!” Francis Bacon, English Philosopher ~ on the occasion of his knighthood 1603

Its Election month and we should have or brains sharpened for asking the relevant questions in order to get the answers we require to make a judgement.

For heaven sake! It’s not rocket science.

BEFORE you shoot your mouth off… ask the WHO, ask the WHY, ask the WHAT, ask the WHERE, ask the HOW.

The English language is blessed with easy rules. You hear a proposition then you question it. THEN if you don’t like the answer… blast away! But we never ever make up our minds based on paltry information or stereotypes and we absolutely never ever shoot our traps off till we know as much about something as we can. Filling in the blanks based on nothing is a very dangerous way to go. It is the antipathy of being English.

Why is it that we, the nation who gave this world such a fantastic language, have the most lyrical language, the language of Shakespeare, the language ideas have been argued in from Bacon to Mill.

But lately I’ve been forced to ask - have we lost the ability to seek information before we judge? Cause everywhere I look around there is some half arsed big mouth shouting loudly when he knows absolutely NOTHING about which he is talking!

What has happened to us?

Not only have we lost the ability to ask questions to make sense of what is around us… we have lost the ability to add up.

Since when does 1+1 =11???

Today I listened to idiots stating that all the jobs are being taken by people from Eastern Europe. OH REALLY? English people want to work in the hop and strawberry fields doing back breaking work so badly that they resent the migrant workers taking those jobs? SHUT UP… I recall that argument was being offered after WW2 when migrant workers came and worked for peanuts rebuilding the infrastructure. The indigenous people didn’t want to do those jobs then, just like they don’t want to do the lowly paid work there is an abundance of now. Most of the employers are indigenous… don’t you think if indigenous workers were hammering on their doors for that work they’d lean that way?

Just watch the now famous documentary…”The day the immigrants left” You will find your WHO, your WHAT, your WHY, your WHEN and your HOW. In the film, presented by Evan Davis, some of the featured locals from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, complained they were routinely turned down for factory work as they were English, an assertion denied by one boss of a potato-packing factory who said: ‘Where British workers are, I don’t know, but they’re not applying for jobs.’ To test if the town needed so many foreign workers, the immigrant employees were temporarily removed from their jobs, and the work given to the local unemployed. The town's British workers have a chance to prove they can do it… by and large…they didn’t want to.

1 + 1 = 2. Always has.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrgh…. It’s simple maths.

But why bother check the facts when jumping to conclusions is much more fun.

This isn’t just about the wider world though, jumping to conclusions about your friends is also the fashion!… can you believe THIS?

I have spent the last 14 months of working my arse off… creating JaxWorld, being editor in chief of a new magazine… to say nothing of raising a teenager single handed and keeping the wolf from the door. Yeah... I guess I could have sat on my arse following my unexpected redundancy… But I didn’t but that is not who I am. (maybe because I was raised by two of those migrants that came here after WW2). But none the less I was accused of being workshy and juvenile.

By someone who could not be BOTHERED to check the facts.

We have come to the point now where even ones own friends cannot be bothered to check out the facts… just jump to conclusions about lone parents why don’t you? And ensure you mock them loudly when you jump your conclusion… after all no smoke without the fire you started with your own match …. Eh????

I am so bloody sick of this attitude. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO US??

We used to know that you have a duty to check your facts before you shout your mouth off!!!

I fear for us if this is the attitude this nation is taking to the ballot box.

Please prove me wrong… please tell me that we are BETTER than that!!!

If you enjoyed this blog and you want to contact Jax or find out more about JaxWorld blog please log onto: http://thejaxworldblog.vpweb.co.uk/

Thanks for voting for JaxWorld as the Best Blog about Stuff in the 2009 Blogger Choice Awards and for all your support that has made this blog such a success.