Emma Soames
This land seems to be becoming no country for old men. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics revealed that the only section of the population in which divorce is rising is among couples over 60. And there is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that this figure is largely driven by women. In many cases someone who has done years of duty as a wife and mother thinks two things when the last child heads off: that this is ‘me’ time and, more damningly perhaps, there must be more to life than this.
The answer to this is probably ‘yes’ if she looks at her female contemporaries, who are energetically grasping new opportunities to work, travel and enjoy themselves. Meanwhile, her husband is perhaps just happy not to be slogging off to an office every day and to spend his early retirement years pottering around at home or in the shed.
Many marriages lose their meaning when children are removed from the equation, but women seem more prepared to cut loose. Sadly, there are few break-ups where both partners want out and I suspect there are many older men out there who have had singledom thrust upon them and hadn’t banked on rebuilding their lives at this rather late stage.
I am seriously loving the new Woteva app for iPhone and iPad. It is Saga’s guide to teenage language, a huge help for those of us who really would like to – or need to – keep up at the back. But more than that, it is just so intriguing to see how language changes when different generations start playing with it. You won’t need me to tell you that boregasm is something that none of us aspires to – as ultimately tedious as it is possible to be – or that a chunder bunny is a young woman who drinks too much. However, I would never have known that boydem is the police or that a Chung is a very pretty girl. My personal favourites are career veneer, when someone tries to make a dull job sound exciting, and puffpoint, an overproduced and underpowered presentation that tells you very little.
Saga has done the world a great service with this clever tool – and, what’s more, thanks to a facility to add words, it should be self-renewing. It’s dudical! Borgastic, I hazard.
One curious sign of the recession in London is the arrival of the blow-dry bar. You will surely have noticed the increasing number of women studying the home-colouring kits at the chemist. The knock-on effect is that hairdressers, who can no longer fill their chairs with women prepared to pay more than £200 for a cut ’n’ colour, are opening little side areas so you can walk in without an appointment and get your hair washed and done in half an hour, with a zero knocked off the price. With the return of ‘done’ hair and big styles, this is the industry’s response to the demand for a professional do that won’t bust increasingly fragile personal budgets.
When I test-drove one last week, for the first time in years the stylist suggested I endure those old-fashioned tools of the trade, rollers and hairspray – now used, not to make us look like our mothers, but to make the do last longer.
It is good to see sectors such as hairdressing responding to the state we’re in. The more ways they find to keep salons busy and prices down, the better it is for all of us – not just the customers but the huge numbers of young people who make hairdressing their career.
My boxed set viewing has been transformed by the discovery of Breaking Bad, an American TV series up there with The Wire and The Killing. The lead character, played by Bryan Cranston (who won an Emmy for the role), is a high-school chemistry teacher with a teenage disabled son, a pregnant wife and no money. When he discovers he has terminal lung cancer he decides to start cooking meth and goes into business with a former pupil turned junkie. Dark and sometimes very violent, it is also really funny. To the great satisfaction of its American fans, a final fifth series has just been commissioned. Here, sadly, only series one and two are currently available on DVD.
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