Jenny Burrell

Somehow, we have evolved into a nation of unpaid critics. We can no longer simply enjoy an experience. We have to evaluate it, score it and report back to the world! Not so long ago, if we bought something, had a meal in a restaurant or received a service, we’d simply move on.

Those days have gone.

We are now living through a Review Revolution. Absolutely nothing is allowed to happen without someone demanding that we give it a rating up to five stars!

You buy a tin opener. The world needs to know if it successfully opened the tin of baked beans. Did it perform as expected? Was the handle comfortable? Would you recommend it to a friend? It’s a tin opener, for heavens sake. It either opens tins or it doesn’t!

You order from your favourite online store. Those socks need a review. Did that toothbrush transform your dental hygiene? Would you recommend it to a friend? I’ve seen a dissertation written by someone over a pair of kitchen scissors! All I wanted to know was if they could also be used to cut paper and not go blunt!

It gets worse. You can no longer go to a restaurant to enjoy a meal without being invited to judge the entire establishment. Was the food good? Was the atmosphere pleasant? Was the lighting appropriate? Was the waiter sufficiently attentive? If he didn’t laugh at my joke do I give him one star? If I’m not happy with the meal, the atmosphere or the waiter I wouldn’t go back. It’s as simple as that!

Even a traumatic visit to the hospital or to the doctor requires a review. When I make an appointment to see the doctor I immediately receive a text message as confirmation and a request to review the visit! Unbelievably, even medical appointments now expect five star ratings. After giving the appropriate amount of stars I have to justify them with comments. Was the receptionist helpful? Did the doctor listen sympathetically to my concerns? Did I feel comfortable in the waiting room?

How exactly do you rate a doctor’s visit? Does the doctor get five stars if he correctly diagnoses your problem? Do you bring the rating down to four starts because you had to wait twenty minutes? Another star lost because the examination was uncomfortable?

I have a question. Does the doctor also have to go through the same procedure? Will he be expected to evaluate every patient? Were they cooperative? Too demanding? Did they ask too many questions? Were they reluctant to accept that Google was not a medical professional? How often has the patient seen a doctor over the last few months? Was the patient a hypochondriac?

It’s the urgency of these review requests which amaze me. Purchases haven’t even been unpacked, the restaurant meal not yet digested and medical feedbacks arrive before any medication has had the chance to work! In fact, hospital review requests arrive before I’ve even got back home!

Dare I ask, is there a reviewer who reviews the reviews?

Perhaps we’re fast approaching a time when absolutely everything will require a review. One day we could be issued with a personal feedback form at birth. We’ll be invited to rate our childhood, our education, our working lives and finally, our funeral, to be completed by our next of kin.

I can just imagine the NHS getting involved. They could send us an annual performance review each year. As we age we’ll be advised, based on customer feedback, that our general health has slipped by 7%. We’ll be asked to complete a patient satisfaction survey rating our various body parts individually. The left hip could get three stars for effort. The right knee might get a final warning and our digestive system placed on a performance improvement plan. We would be advised that replacement body parts are currently out of stock and to check our warranty hasn’t expired.

Of course, reviews can be useful. They can warn us about shoddy products, dreadful service and establishments best avoided. They can also be a platform to praise excellent service and high quality products. They should not be inflicted on us. We should not feel guilty if we don’t reply!

I think it’s time we stop rating every waking moment and get back to the business of living without having to comment, review, evaluate, criticise, complain or justify. Life should be about enjoying, celebrating and hoping we can live long, happy healthy lives. It’s definitely not about a continual customer satisfaction survey!👠

There are few things in life that can turn a perfectly pleasant human being into a thoroughly unpleasant one! There’s lack of sleep, unexpected bills or discovering you have no internet service when you want to watch the final episode of Traitors.

Alas, nothing comes close to the personality transformation which happens to me when I get hungry. I don’t mean just feeling peckish around meal times, I’m talking about full on Hangry when I haven’t eaten for sixteen hours or more. Let me clarify. On Tuesday mornings I do a tough thirty minute exercise class, then an hour and a half yoga before breakfast which is around 1.00 pm. My digestive system struggles with exercising after food so this is how I have to roll.

So, Tuesday mornings are the ultimate test of my character. In fact, I always hope that I don’t meet anyone I know on my walk home from the Park Room. My stomach is staging a full scale protest, my patience had long packed its bags and left and my ability to engage in polite conversation hangs by a very slender thread. You would have thought that Yoga would teach me the art of inner peace, breathing and mindfulness. By the time I lie down for the fifteen minute relaxation session, all I want to do is inhale something edible. Fresh air, who needs that? I’d much rather breathe in a huge bowl of cereal with all the trimmings!

In fact, if scientists ever got around to studying the Hangry condition, I could be considered a particularly interesting case. Perhaps ‘Hangry’ should be officially recognised as a medical condition. When walking down The Dell on Tuesdays I should wear a large red alert button on my forehead. A warning that I have lost all interest in civilised behaviour so don’t stop me to chat about the weather. Don’t be nice to me, be cheerful or friendly. I’m a walking humanitarian crisis! I’ll probably say something I’ll live to regret!

Under normal circumstances there are warning triggers which I don’t generally ignore. Stage one is hearing my stomach rumble. Stage two, the thought of food insidiously creeps in and slowly takes over. Stage three, I become unreasonably irritable. Stage four I find everyone around me intensely annoying even if they’re not doing anything. Stage five is when I get a complete personality transplant and should be avoided at all costs!

It’s quite extraordinary how quickly symptoms disappear once nourishment has been administered! I leave the house on a Tuesday morning a pleasant reasonable human being. When I return I’ve morphed into someone contemplating divorce, murder and possibly a bit manic. And keep me away from any sharp objects! After my bowl of cereal the world becomes a happier place and the person I agreed to spend my life with, has miraculously transformed back into the man who swept me off my feet all those years ago!

So, perhaps world peace isn’t as complicated as we think! Wars could end, political disagreements evaporate and international relations immediately improve. Before world leaders walk into the United Nations building for diplomatic negotiations, hand out large quantities of delicious food and drink!

Let’s get the kettles on, fire up the frying pans and take out the HP sauce. All our problems will be resolved with a decent bacon butty and a cup of tea!👠

I watched you, Mum, just fade away

Your eyes that once were warm and bright

Grew dim a little more each day

As they became bereft of light

But some days we talked for a while

We sang, danced, pretended all’s well

Your face lit up, I saw you smile

And watched you emerge from your shell

If for just one last precious day

I could have the Mum I once knew

See you before you slipped away

Back to the ghost that replaced you

I felt guilt when I dared to grieve

You were alive, still drawing breath

I found it hard, just couldn’t believe

This slow, wicked, tortuous death

Dementia didn’t hear my cries

It took your past, thoughts, your name

It stole your life before my eyes

Left me alone to bear the pain

No single goodbye, then to mourn

That I found was the cruelest part

When you held me when I was born

You didn’t know you’d break my heart

I could not save you from your fate

This evil plague had stolen your mind

Could not undo, could not abate

The sadness that you left behind

And when I felt your hand grow still

I stayed with you until the end

I loved you then, I love you still

Your daughter, protector and friend

Dear Teenager

I’m writing to you from a place you couldn’t possibly imagine and at an age you’d think impossibly old. I have the benefit of hindsight and would love to take your hand and tell you not to be so hard on yourself. You have no idea how much life is waiting out there for you and how many versions of yourself you’ll have to go through before you reach the position I’m in now.

But there are two things I wish I could give you; a glimpse of the woman you’ll become and the knowledge that you will get there in your own time. You’re going to be alright! You’re going to survive these difficult teenage years although I realise this won’t seem remotely possible right now!

I see you sitting on the bed in your sunny bedroom worrying about something, which, in the great scheme of things, will turn out to be insignificant. But not right now! Right now it feels as if the world is against you and you are completely alone.

You go to an all girls school where you are surrounded by other girls who seem infinitely more confident, prettier and definitely more interesting than you. Not only are you painfully shy, have a stammer and have uncontrollably curly hair but you have spots that seem to have declared war on your face! All these awful ‘disabilities’ have made you realise that no boy will ever find you attractive!

And there is this one boy who you are profoundly, hopelessly and spectacularly in love with! This really saddens me. Even though I’ve been around a bit I can still feel your angst. You are always thinking about him, analysing every word he says and every glance he gives in your direction as if you’re gathering evidence for a court case! You’re planning your future together. You fantasise about dancing closely with him, holding his hand and that first glorious, rapturous kiss!

Stop!

There are five girls to every boy in your town. He has first choice of all the popular beauties. You are convinced that he is the most wonderful, handsome boy who has ever walked the earth. I have news for you! He isn’t! Looks are skin deep! I know because I had one date with him and wondered what on earth anyone could ever see in him! I bet you wouldn’t believe me. What do adults know?

But one day you’ll discover that this boy and all the others are not the highly sophisticated breed of humans you imagine them to be. Most teenage boys are too busy wondering whether their own hair looks ridiculous, whether their trousers are the correct length and if they can get through one day without saying or doing something spectacularly stupid in front of girls, you included. They’re as insecure as you are!

You’re carrying around a judgemental committee in your head. Trust me, this committee genuinely doesn’t know what it’s talking about! It’s creating all these rules about how you should look, what you should wear and how you are expected to behave. When you are already so shy and self conscious these rules feel like you’re in a prison cell preventing you from getting out there to enjoy life, your family and your friends. You are constantly questioning what people think, what they say and why they’ve said it. Have you done the wrong thing? Have you embarrassed yourself again? Have they noticed your spots, your bad hair day, will anyone ever be able to fall in love with you?

Now listen to me! You do grow up and become braver. You’ll discover that confidence isn’t something you’re born with but something life gradually gives you. You are going to get a good job, travel, experience things you could never imagine possible! And, most importantly, you will fall in love and rather wonderfully, someone will fall in love with you! You’ll have two beautiful children who will grow into kind, loving adults. You will build a life that is fuller and happier than you could ever have dreamt possible.

Life isn’t a fairy tale and I’m not going to insult you and pretend it is. There will be disappointments and heartbreak. There will be moments when you’ll wonder if you are strong enough. You are! One day you will stop caring quite so much, but not completely, because that’s just the kind of person you are. You’ll say what you think and not let your stammer get you down or define you.

You’re young and understandably frightened as you have absolutely no idea what lies waiting for you. You nurture your fears, your insecurities and are wasting time worrying about things that will never happened.

But, alas, you will never know any of this. You will never receive the comfort these words could have given you because I can only write this letter many years later. You had no crystal ball, no fortune teller whispering in your ear. You simply had to take that brave step into the unknown, like all young teenagers do.

You won’t know which paths will lead to heartache or which ones to happiness but that is how it is meant to be. You have to live life, not watch it unfold from a safe distance. Your future isn’t shared with you or written for you. You’ve have to write it yourself. You’ll be shaped by all the good times, the heartbreak and all your adventures, the biggest being leaving South Africa and moving to England.

And that is how the frightened young girl who lived, loved, stumbled, laughed, endured and discovered so many wonderful things along life’s way, became the woman sitting writing this letter to you today.

There comes a time in every woman’s life when she begins to wonder if she has become invisible. Not literally, of course because I’m one of those women. I can still see myself in the mirror, although some mornings I wish I couldn’t.

This phenomenon doesn’t happen dramatically or instantaneously. There is no puff of smoke and no mysterious disappearance. No one makes a public announcement that says, ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, for our next magic act, I give you the invisible woman!’

It’s a gradual process. First, the faces of elderly women become a bit blurred, then they turn hazy and then, hey presto, they vanish altogether!

I have walked into a shop with my husband and asked a young salesman a question. He has instantly turned to my husband with his reply. And the times when I’ve been standing at a counter patiently waiting to be served. A younger person strolls in and gets served before me. I try again, holding up my purchase, not wanting to cause any trouble but, nonetheless, feeling rather miffed! It’s as if I’m perceived to be part of the shop’s furnishings. Maybe that tasteless lamp next to me, or that opinionated coat stand behind me?

A friend of mine took her husband with her to see a consultant. The consultant greeted them both with a handshake and ushered them to the two chairs in front of his desk. My friend duly verified her name, date of birth and clarified her symptoms after the consultant had read the letter from her GP. All seemed fine until, after the initial interrogation, the consultant seemed to ignore her and only address her husband. Apparently this strange interaction between consultant and husband continued for a while until my friend had had enough.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but I believe the woman you’re discussing is actually sitting right here. She’s in one of the chairs opposite you. She is the patient and the one with the symptoms and if we’re being technical, the one who saw the GP and made this appointment. Perhaps I should leave the room and let the two of you get on with my consultation?

‘I felt invisible, she told me. ‘I wasn’t even treated like a child, it was much worse!’ I brought my husband with me so that he could listen and take notes, an extra pair of ears, not my mouthpiece!

And then there is the mismatch in the fashion industry which seems to ignore the spending power of the ‘grey pound’ and have a rather unhealthy obsession with youth. Adverts show that fashion is all about the young, impossibly tall, impossibly thin women who live on a rice cake a day. These clothes just don’t work for the older women who get relegated to a corner, somewhere between ‘comfortable’ and ‘sensible’. We have reached the age where we know what suits us, still want to feel fabulous and wear fashionable clothes. We certainly don’t want to be twenty something again. We simply want to be acknowledged and catered for as important members of society instead of invisible pensioners in twinsets!

But maybe there are some advantages to being invisible. I enjoy sitting quietly in coffee shops and observing instead of being observed. I can live in a world without anyone expecting me to participate. I watch couples arguing in hushed tones, teenagers communicating entirely though their phones, and have even heard a man trying to convince his wife that the television that he’d just bought, which covered the entire wall of their sitting room, was a one off, unmissable bargain!

Perhaps this is how older journalists get their best stories?

There is a difference between choosing to be invisible and actually being treated as though you are! If I spot someone I don’t particularly want to speak to I improvise. Either my phone needs urgent attention or I develop a fascination for something or someone on the other side of the room. It’s a little performance I have perfected over the years. It’s a delicate art that starts with a casual glance, an expertly timed distraction and a swift retreat. For a few glorious seconds I become the master of my own invisibility. I perform my own disappearing act. No smoke, no mirrors, just perfect timing!

I’ve earned the choice not to see or speak to someone but I don’t want the world to make that decision for me! I don’t want people to look through me or assume I have nothing to contribute because I’ve had a few more birthday than they’ve had. I’ve lived too much, laughed too much and suffered too much to just fade away quietly into the background. I may occasionally choose to disappear, but I want that to be my decision, not the conclusion the world has reached on my behalf!

But something that I have noticed, is the art of ‘selective visibility’. Charity bucket collectors outside shops always make a beeline for me. When asked if I could volunteer for a good cause, organise a fundraising event or attend a meeting I become visible to the point of illumination! I’m retired so people automatically presume that I have vast quantities of time that needs to be filled. Those are times when I desperately try to make myself invisible but to no avail.

This is not meant to be a sexist blog but I really don’t feel that men, in general, suffer from the same problem. Perhaps it’s less about age and more about expectations society places on us. Curiously, a man growing older is still regarded as someone with knowledge, authority and experience. When men go grey they are told that they look distinguished. Women’s grey hair should be disguised and they’re perceived as being past their prime. Yet we’ve both accumulated the same thing, years of living, learning, surviving and a certain amount of wisdom.

I wrote this blog about how easy it is to make certain people in society feel discarded. I joke about being overlooked, ignored or spoken over by sections of our society, but behind the humour is sadness. Somehow, when women, and it is mainly women, grow older we are made to feel less important. We’ve served our useful purpose and now must be content to become an observer rather than a participant. But we do all want to be noticed, listened to and valued, no matter what our age.

Recent Age concern research supports this idea that older women experience ageism, including social invisibility and are being treated as less deserving than older men. Behind every ‘invisible’ woman is someone with a lifetime of stories and a heart full of memories who longs to be heard, still wants to be seen and know that she still matters! It’s not her failure to remain visible. It’s society’s failure to see her! 👠

Once upon a time we knew things. We weren’t walking encyclopaedias but we managed. The human race survived by gleaning knowledge from the world around us. We watched, listened, experimented and learnt from one another. Knowledge was passed down from one generation to another. Each generation added a little more towards the great store of human understanding.

We knew our friend’s telephone numbers. We knew how to get somewhere without a satnav. We consulted recipes, we read books. If we didn’t know something we asked someone who did or accepted that we’d probably never know the answer. Knowledge has always been our greatest survival tool.

It started innocently enough. It was subtle. It didn’t arrive one morning with trumpets blazing to announce that life as we’ve always known it was about to change forever! It crept insidiously into our lives, one small convenience at a time! It came in the form of a hand held mobile phone, a small device that allowed us to make telephone calls without the telephone being attached to a wall. It was revolutionary, sure, but fairly straightforward.

Then somehow that little phone got ideas above its station.

It acquired a camera, the internet, emails, texts, weather forecasts, shopping, banking and enough apps to fill several lifetimes! And then the introduction of AI created another whole new world. Before long that humble little phone had transformed itself into the Great Oracle, becoming a fundamental part of our lives! It can tell us where we are, where we’re going, what the weather’s doing, how many calories in a banana, the capital of Kazakhstan, the opening hours of a garden centre and how long we should boil an egg. The list is endless!

And we now keep a doctor in our pocket! Our little phone has appointed itself as the medical practitioner we never knew we needed. There is no waiting in a queue for our call to be answered, no receptionist asking intimate questions or if it’s urgent or could we wait two weeks for an appointment. And we can ask it anything. Google, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, whichever digital assistant we have chosen, can offer medical advice without us ever leaving our sofa!

We can ask , for example, ChatGPT, a medical question and, if we’ve already shared previous symptoms and medications, instead of starting from scratch each time, it can join the dots and put the latest query into context. It’s like a doctor who has read our notes before we’ve walked through the door!

We can call on our personal GP day or night. It won’t make us justify our symptoms. It simply waits while we discuss them in as much detail as possible. No judgment and no time restraints. It’ll ask pertinent questions and base the prognosis on comparing our symptoms against millions of other searches made by people feeling the same way. It bases its fundings, not by certainty, but by probability and confirmed by actual medical data. That’s what makes the diagnoses so convincing! But that does not mean that it should be a replacement for a doctor. It can just help us decide whether we really need to see one.

We no longer have to worry about being grammatically correct when we communicate. Once a sentence was structured with a beginning, a middle and an end. Now, apparently, whole words and sentences are considered an unnecessary extravagance. Thanks is now ‘thx’, you is now ‘u’, are, ‘r’, message, ‘msg’, later, l8r’, great, ‘gr8’. And then there are the common ones already well used, OMG, oh my God, BTW, by the way, IMO, in my opinion. Soon I suspect the entire English language will consist of three letters, a thumbs up emoji and a shrug!

We are, whether we like it or not, living in a brave new world. Technology reigns supreme and we are expected to keep up with it. Everything is becoming smarter and faster and reliant on passwords we struggle to remember. For the technophobes amongst us it is frankly alarming. But resist as we might there seems to be little choice but to embrace this digital revolution, press the right button and hope that we don’t inadvertently launch a satellite!

Once knowledge was gathered from books and from men

Then passed down through generations, again and again

Now families and friends are faces on a screen

Wonderfully connected yet very rarely seen

To get all the answers we have gadgets galore

So now we need humans much less than before

The art of communication will soon fade away

We’ll just text or email if we have something to say 👠

There are some things in life that are really annoying. Then there are things that are only mildly annoying, little habits and behaviours that shouldn’t bother us, but, somehow, they do!

I understand that we are only human. We all have irritating little foibles. Take the person who stops in a doorway. Not beside it, or just outside it, but right in it! They’ve reached the doorway and decided that this is the perfect place to check their phone, rearrange their thoughts and consider where they want to go next.

A queue of people soon builds up behind him. They would quite like to use the doorway for its original purpose.

‘Er, excuse me,’ someone says politely.

He doesn’t move.

‘Um, sorry, please could I get past?’

Eventually he moves about three inches which is clearly his contribution to the community!

Supermarkets are where patience is stretched to the limit. You want pasta sauce. Two women are comparing jars with the concentration of someone deciding which candidate should become prime minister. You hover, politely. You are ignored. You move to the left. So do they. You step to the right. So do they. Defeated you move on to the next aisle hoping you’ll remember to go back and get your bottle of pasta sauce!

Then there are those who don’t realise that their cars have something called indicators which should be used when they are going to turn. They can move a lever either left or right, up or down. For them indicators are optional. For us it’s just another irritation and another hazard on the road!

Let’s not forget the person who tells you that they’ll only be five minutes. It’s an optimistic statement made by someone who has no intention whatsoever of measuring time. It could be twenty minutes, half an hour, or, in extreme cases, next Tuesday!

Another real bugbear is cyclists, most of which are also motorists. They drive cars. They must surely suffer the same frustration as we do when we round the bend and are suddenly confronted by a hoard of cyclists. They’ve spread across the road like they’re out for a leisurely catchup with friends. Not a couple of cyclists keeping to their side of the road. The entire membership of the local cycling club in a happy little convoy, chatting, laughing and gesticulating, completely oblivious to the fact that they’ve created a traffic jam of biblical proportions.

Why do cyclists morph into a different species when they climb out of their cars and onto bicycles? Suddenly the road belongs to them. It’s amazing how quickly personalities change when swapping four wheels for two!

Then we get the one speed driver. It doesn’t matter if the speed limits is 20, 30, 40 or 50 miles an hour. They have selected their speed and that’s it! Along that whole, winding road with no overtaking places, the speed limit will vary from 20 to 50 miles an hour. Their car is stuck at 28 mph! Perhaps their car has only two settings. ‘Off’ or ‘28 mph’! Perhaps they just regard the speed limits as interesting suggestions rather than actual instructions!

Some people have never heard of ‘personal space’. They stand so close behind you in a queue that you can practically feel them breathing down your neck. You take a small step forward. They follow. You gingerly edge forward again. So do they. Eventually you’re standing so close to the person in front of you that you’ve inadvertently become part of a human sandwich.

Emails were invented to make life easier. I’m not convinced! Every morning I open my inbox to find clothes I don’t want, holidays I can’t afford, things I didn’t even know existed and special offers on products I have never shown the slightest interest in. I spend a part of every day deleting them and trying to ‘unsubscribe’. For a lot of companies the tiny word ‘unsubscribe’, although a legal requirement, is well hidden and often ignored!

The ‘reply all’ brigade are really annoying! Someone sends an innocent message to twenty people. Within seconds phones start pinging. ‘Thanks John’, ‘see you Tuesday’, ‘can you send me the details’, ‘good idea’. For heavens sake, we don’t care! It’s between you and John! Push the correct button!

I suppose life would be rather dull if we were all perfect! What would we have to complain about?

We’re all mildly annoying though we may not agree

For what drives you mad might seem harmless to me

So don’t take offence at what people do

‘Cos there’s a good chance that you’re doing it too! 👠

I thought that time would heal the pain

That one day I’d feel whole again

But the passage of time just shows me how

To cope without you, to survive somehow

‘Cos I still see you in the smallest thing

A picture, a flower, in the songs I sing

But life goes on, as life will do

The sun still rises without you

I speak to you but you can’t hear

That’s when the loss is still so clear

If I could just have one more day

There are so many things I want to say

I’d hold you close and make you see

Just how dear you are to me

I’d listen to stories heard before

So precious to hear them all once more

Because grief’s not a door you close

Nor is it something that just goes

It settles quietly, stays within

Takes the place where once you’d been

Although I cannot hold you now

Or see you, speak to you somehow

You’re living in every part of me

In who I’m now, who I’m going to be

You’ll stay with me through the years

Through happy times, sadness, tears

You’ll remain a constant in my life

The kindest mother and dearest wife

Our special love doesn’t ever leave

It’ll stay with me, I’ll always grieve

Perhaps that is the hardest part

You’ve left my life but not my heart

When I first heard the expression ‘apples and pears’ I naturally thought of Cockney rhyming slang for stairs. But in the world of body shapes, apples and pears have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it!

‘Apples’ and ‘pears’ are categories used to define the shape of the female form. The reason why these fruits were chosen is anyone’s guess! Perhaps there was a panel of ‘experts’ sitting around a table with a fruit bowl discussing the female body? Perhaps the bowl only contained apples and pears? ‘That’ll do’ said the Managing Director and, just like that, generations of women have been reduced to a piece of produce.

For women to classify as an ‘apple’ they need to carry weight around the top and middle of their abdomens. ‘Pears’ store surplus weight around their hips and thighs. Personally I think there should have been a wider choice. Perhaps those were the most recognisable fruit? If it was a panel of experts sitting around a table they obviously had no qualifications whatsoever in either anatomy or fashion. I’m going to stick my neck out and say it was probably a panel of men!

Whatever our fruit category, as we age, clothes shopping becomes more difficult. We walk into a shop knowing exactly what we want only to discover that nobody has designed it for us! Clothes seem to be aimed at either twenty year olds with figures that defy gravity, those who prefer shapeless tents or at women who want to dress like their grandmothers. There is very little in between.

In our youth most ‘off the peg’ clothes fitted us. Now we’re expected to take what we can find. We have to compromise, disguise, tuck in and hope for the best. We need the oversized blouse to deflect from the lack of a waist or an expanded bust, the jacket must be wide enough to fit around our hips but not droop at the shoulders and the trousers mustn’t reveal too much about our thighs. Clothes need to tactfully detract attention from those areas which have now become liabilities!

As we learn about dressing to suit our shape, we look for ‘forgiving’ clothes. That doesn’t mean clothes forgive us for eating that last piece of cake! It means that we chose clothes that gently skim the bits that have become less cooperative. A dress needs to be a miracle worker. It must hide a tummy, disguise a hip and create the impression that our waist is still somewhere around where we last remember seeing it! I’ve always loved that word ‘forgiving’. It’s as though an item of clothing has been informed about our vanished waistline and generous bust or hips and decides not to hold it against us!

Age is unkind. Bodies seem to develop their own ideas about redistribution. You can exercise religiously and follow a strict, healthy diet yet, while you sleep, it gently moves things around. One morning you wake up and discover that certain bits have begun to migrate and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it!

And that means arms as well. Sleeves become a necessity and not an option. When the upper arms decide that they’d quite like their independence they cease to be part of the team. They gradually lose their firmness and acquire an alarming ‘wobble’. What was once a neat, toned little cylinder morphs into something resembling a small hammock. You raise an arm to say goodbye and, long after your hand has stopped waving, the rest of your arm carries on with the farewell.

There are different varieties of arms. There’s the ‘batwing’, ‘flapjack’ or ‘pendulum’. Now if we had to include them in the fruit bowl perhaps there could be a ‘banana’. This variety would be long, slightly curved and still relatively firm. A conference pear could be narrower at the shoulder, becoming mysteriously fuller towards the elbow. ‘Grapes’ could be the little wrinkly bits that appear from nowhere. A ‘watermelon’ is probably best avoided unless your upper arms have become exceptionally enthusiastic!

Buying trousers is depressing and best avoided. A pair that fits perfectly around the waist is usually far too generous around the hips and thighs. Perhaps that’s why elasticated waists are so popular. They’re not merely comfortable but also emotionally supportive! They don’t judge you after a meal and just mould themselves into your current shape.

Stomachs could be added to the fruit bowl. A ‘plum’ for the smaller version that wasn’t there twenty years ago. A ‘pomegranate’ when there are several little bumps and bulges and all are competing for attention. A ‘mango’ which is softer, fuller and somehow not quite where you remembered it. To complete the fruit bowl let’s add an orange for the thighs and over ripe peaches for the knees.

So, decide whether you’re an apple or a pear

Then dress with cunning and plenty of flair

Hide what you can and show what you dare

Embrace who you are and enjoy what you wear 👠

Not all that long ago, when we needed to go somewhere unfamiliar, we used a map. I was never able to read a map. I could stare at it for twenty minutes and still not have the faintest idea where I was. The trouble with maps is that roads run in all different directions. They are marked as coloured lines, numbers and tiny symbols which presumably meant something to someone but absolutely nothing to me!

I would turn the map this way, then that way, then upside down, trying to make the road in front of me correspond with the road on paper. In those far off days my husband still thought that I had some navigational skills. Bless him. How wrong he was! He regarded map reading as a perfectly straightforward, logical activity.

He’d hand me the map and say ‘You navigate’. What he failed to appreciate was that I never had any idea what I was supposed to do with it! He could glance at a map and know where we were, where we needed to go and which road we had to take. He never understood how I could find something so simple, so complicated! To me a map was just a collection of coloured spaghetti! The final indignity would come when I had to fold the map back up! It unfolded in seconds but getting it back into its original shape was a feat requiring the patience of a saint and the spatial awareness of an origami expert.

So, when satnavs arrived I welcomed them with open arms! What a wonderful invention! I would know where I was, where I was going and precisely how long it would take me to get there! All I had to do was enter the address, press start and obey instructions. Simple!

The first time I used a satnav it had a very pleasant female voice, calm, measured and reassuring. She never got flustered and she never swore. Her directions were simple. ‘At the next roundabout take the fourth exit’. Except, when I was approaching the roundabout at forty miles an hour, there were at least six exits with a motor bike, a tractor and a white van filling the three lanes in front of me.

‘Take the fourth exit’.

Which one was the fourth? I tried to count as I drove past each one, struggling to move into the left lane because there was a car sitting on my bumper. I had begun to panic but the satnav remained calm.

‘Now take the fourth exit’.

Thank you, I heard the first time.

I immediately take the next exit and find myself heading north up the M6 instead of south down the M56. This was not a minor navigational error. This mistake involved sitting on the motorway heading up to Scotland! The satnav remained calm. There was no panic in her voice, not even a hint of ‘now why did you turn down the wrong exit when I kept on reminding you which one to take!’ She simply said ‘recalculating’.

A while later she announced ‘in two hundred yards take the next left’.

Unfortunately I had already sailed past that exit at motorway speed.

‘Take the next left’.

There wasn’t a next left or even the possibility of a next left! There was, however, a great deal of motorway stretching ahead and I was travelling in completely the wrong direction.

‘Recalculating’, came her dulcet tones.

It was at this point that I felt she could begin to lose patience but, after several more instructions and an unnecessary tour of the North West, I was reunited with the correct route. I learnt an important lesson that day. When the satnav says it’s ’recalculating’ it isn’t necessarily correcting my mistake. It’s simply working out how much further it can send me before I realise that I have gone completely the wrong way!

Sadly satnavs don’t have a sense of humour. If I’ve missed a turning they don’t say, ‘never mind, we all make mistakes’. They just say ‘recalculating’. There is something deeply judgemental about that word. It sounds as if I’ve disappointed her.

‘Keep right’, she’ll tell me.

Right where?

‘Bear left’.

How much?

‘Continue straight’.

For how long?

My personal favourite is ‘Your destination is on the right’.

Excellent, but I’m travelling at thirty miles an hour and there is nowhere to pull in, the car behind me is in my boot and the only thing on my right is a hedge! Perhaps she knows something that I don’t? Perhaps there’s a secret tunnel? Perhaps I’m expected to drive through the hedge?

The best thing about a satnav is the one blue line. It’s only one colour and the only one I need to follow! It’s displayed on the screen in confidence and stretches ahead, leading me towards my final destination. But it doesn’t know about road works or diversions and often hasn’t realise that another road has replaced it.

I rarely use the satnav. Each time I do she treats me like a new recruit who has somehow failed the basic training so is given instructions with patient, military precision. I get reintroduced to a system that I will never fully master. I no longer question her authority, I simply try to obey like a mildly confused apprentice who’s not really up for the job.

And so it remains that we’ll never be best friends, only rare acquaintances who meet when needs must and communicate under sufferance! 👠