Regain your self respect

Embrace aging and the ravishing of time

One of the things you notice about really brilliant barristers is how simply they speak. You might assume that the more elevated barristers are the more flighty their rhetoric becomes, but you would be wrong. Skill and experience are never more clearly displayed when complicated things are communicated simply.

Applying that rule to broadcasting it has become apparent that my good friends Christoffer and Alexander van Tulleken are really reaching the top of their game. Their new podcast What's Up Docs? contains episodes on topics as simply titled as ‘Knees’, ‘Headaches’ and ‘Sleep’. These are not simple topics and yet, in just 30 minutes, with the help of an invited expert, you come away feeling as well informed as any undergraduate medical student might.

Being a man of 45 I listened particularly intently to a recent episode Why does our hair fall out? I had always been of the view that if I still had a reasonable head at 40 that whatever shedding happened thereafter would be only congruent with my extreme old age. Turns out that 40 isn’t that old after all and while I haven’t got much to complain about in terms of coverage I still found myself googling Minoxidil after the episode had ended.

I had not realised that this was the active ingredient of Regaine which is a product I have always scoffed at on the shelves in Superdrug, primarily because I could never understand why it isn’t called Hirsutes You. I immediately closed the browser and stiffened my resolve to let nature take its course. This seems an increasingly unfashionable course of action in an age in which it is almost considered an act of eccentricity to have a face that matches one’s years.

I saw the excellent 28 Years Later recently and the only real moment of levity in the film comes when a nonplussed child is confronted with a 21st century ‘enhanced’ face. What a contrast to the naturally storied face of the late, lamented Maggie Smith. We have reached the absurd position in which any actor playing an older role will have to be aged for the role even if the actor is actually older than the role they are playing. It is increasingly unacceptable to pass judgement about the use of Botox and its ilk but I find it depressing that choose to conceal the wisdom they do have with the youth they don’t. The lines on our faces tell the stories of our lives and when we erase those lines don’t we announce to the world that our story isn’t worth reading?

It would be considered an act of sacrilegious horror to interfere with the face of a newborn such is the value we attach to innocence. And yet how many faces of experience have their integrity (and dignity) so preserved? I get it, nobody likes death or the outward manifestation of its approach but I don’t want to try and deceive my children that I am any age other than I am. I want them to see me eating well and exercising often, not anxiously applying hair tonic while frowning miserably at my lined reflection.

And, as that great philosopher Uncle Monty put it: ‘There can be no true beauty without decay’.