It's hard to care about anti-aging treatment when your business is in trouble or your mortgage is in arrears, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
THANK GOD the time for detoxing has passed. Only the very young have the courage to face into a full working day fuelled solely by a cleansing fruit platter. They are the ones who are going to try to stay wheat and dairy-free for January, popping milk thistle tablets all the while. Bless them. They have to do all the difficult stuff.
It was the young who were slithering all over the ice-strewn pavements of Dublin at 3.30am on New Year's morning. Not for the first time we had cause to reflect on the chutzpah of Irish girls, on this occasion wearing seven inch heels in the snow. Of course the girls didn't know it was going to snow when they left home for the night – none of us did – but they were very gutsy at the prospect of striding over sheets of frost wearing shoe-boots and a sequined mini. Luckily, most of them had their mates with them. It was like walking through the film Blade Runner, only with snow instead of rain.
In the course of a one-hour walk we saw one police officer (on a bicycle which he was reluctant to dismount, and which provided the target for quite a few remarks). What exactly is the policing policy on New Year’s Eve? We saw three empty taxis. Not one taxi stopped, for us or for anybody else. The taxis had cut and run by this stage: so much for the consumer comforts provided by deregulating the taxi business. Presumably, the drivers were frightened, and this was understandable if not commendable because there were insurance claims shaping up before your very eyes.
The young people were pretty plastered – none of us was sober – and falling like nine pins, all the time. Two friends, making a similar journey along the North Circular Road, thought that they had stumbled on a riotous party in the area. It was only as they approached Phibsborough that they realised that all these chatty, cheerful, partying young people had just dropped their injured friends off at AE in the Mater.
You could only hope, as a drunken girl in purple shoe-boots collapsed repeatedly into the arms of a young man who was saying to her: “now come on, come on” that it ended well for all the young people as they headed for the outer suburbs, God knows how.
Surprisingly, it was the middle-aged who emerged best out of this situation, whether we were turning our comfortable taxis towards home, or marching through the youthful mayhem in our sensible shoes borrowed from our hosts. It is wonderful to know the owner of the premises at which you have spent the evening.
So, let the young people detox now if they feel like it. The rest of us are left with a list of remarkably unhelpful suggestions about how we should become healthier and look better in the new year. You know the type of thing: “Here’s to a happy new you in 2010!”. Personally I blame Carol Vorderman, who has made a fortune out of the detoxing business.
So we are directed to start sprinkling oats on our bathwater. The instructions become stranger every year. Apparently, if you substitute a silk or satin pillowcase for your old one it will turn out all the better for you. Silk and satin pillowcases are somehow, in a way that has never been explained with any clarity, less ageing than other sorts of pillowcases.
Beetroot is commended for containing “zero fat”. We should be applying foot cream every night and struggling to understand the mysterious phenomenon of grey hair, so that we can treat it with the care and intelligence that grey hair deserves.
All of this is designed, presumably, to keep our middle-aged minds off the national bankruptcy and the dying throes of what we once thought was an economy. The young people have their music, their mates and their romances to keep them distracted and also the prospect of emigration.
Detoxing has to be less stressful when you have no work to go to and can hang round the house all day in your pyjamas. The old have to be provided with some footling individual projects to stop them throwing things at shareholders’ meetings. “Treat your precious mitts as you would your face,” advise the beauty editors.
Male readers do slightly better out of this proposed post-Christmas regime. They’re simply told to give up drinking and make more money – excellent advice at any time of year. But for women this constant round of self-improvement every January has become a little wearing in these straitened times. The advice that you should “once a week, treat yourself to an all-over body brushing to keep the skin super-smooth, boost circulation and battle cellulite,” seems a bit superfluous now that the whole country is wearing a hair shirt next to the skin. The urge to clear out your make up bag becomes less compelling whilst waiting for the axe to fall on your small business, your big mortgage or your husband’s job.
Or perhaps all these tiny, recommended fripperies are a comfort to some people, instead of a pressure. However, these days detoxing is surely a frippery too far except for the fearless youth.