How to Get Over Being Young

A Rough Guide to Midlife

Charlotte Bauer

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781838952006
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838951993
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology

A deliciously funny and sage guide to midlife - an unscientific, flaws-and-all account of one woman's adventures and misadventures through the dark comedy of the wilderness years. Through her own experiences as a fifty-something woman, and those of her three sisters, her indomitable mum and rebellious auntie, Charlotte tackles the big questions every woman seeks answers to at this time of our lives - chiefly: How the hell am I going to get over being young in a world obsessed with youth? Written with warmth, wisdom and irreverence this guide to midlife is perfect for readers of Nora Ephron, Caitlin Moran and India Knight.

Living the Dream

‘Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.’

— AESOP’S FABLES

Packing up my bags and plenty of baggage, I moved to France.

Some sage once said that running away wasn’t the answer because you took yourself with you wherever you went. But to me this was the whole point – running away with myself! I preferred Audrey Hepburn’s take on solitude: I don’t want to be alone, she’d once said, I want to be left alone. Admittedly, I wasn’t being chased down the street by baying fans whenever I ran out for a pint of milk in sunglasses, but the distinction she made between being alone and being left alone perfectly summed up my feelings. Audrey’s smart little epigram spoke not only to a desire for privacy, but also to a craving for anonymity. Living in a place where I knew no one and no one knew me was both a daunting prospect and hugely appealing. I would be … nobody, and this would afford me the opportunity to just … be.

There was strong evidence to support the view that countless women had improved their lives by leaving them – lighting out for Bali with a copy of Eat Pray Love, searching for a way forward, or perhaps a way back. My quest was to find the meaning of life after youth in a place where I felt safe and free. And I had found my Bali.

My new home was a crumbly stone farmhouse in a rural corner of south-west France, a golden landscape of sunflowers and vines so closely resembling an Impressionist painting it appeared that life really was imitating art. It was the kind of place people came to on holiday and, after a few bottles of the local plonk and third-degree sunstroke, thought they wanted to live there. Just like me.

I couldn’t wait to go to the local markets with my new basket and straw hat and pretend to be Juliette Binoche.

Since scraping through couples counselling, hammering out a Selfish-A-Type deal with Husband and embarking on a trial separation, he and I were getting along much better.

We’d travelled to France together, I on a one-way ticket, to sign the papers on the house, and had just two weeks to set everything up before Husband returned to South Africa. We spent the first evening assembling our DIY bed before we could lie on it (we needed separate continents, not separate beds).

Our mutual goodwill had even survived a trip to IKEA to buy the homeware essentials.

Despite IKEA’s logo being visible from space, we managed to miss the turn-off, which we only realised when we saw a sign saying Next Exit Barcelona. We pulled into the emergency lane to have a row about whose fault it was. This was in the days when satnav was more likely to drive you into a brick wall than to your desired destination, and all we had to go on was the map drawn on a serviette by the kind owner of the B&B where we’d stayed while waiting to take occupation of the crumbly stone house. Eventually we pulled into IKEA’s stadiumsized car park and joined the throngs of other couples in matching puffer jackets going through the revolving doors. In the mega-store’s fabled canteen we broke Swedish meatballs together before entering the giant maze of showrooms to purchase exactly the same cushions and crockery as the rest of middle Europe. Going into friends’ houses was like bumping into another woman wearing the same dress at a party: you just had to hope the Kivik rug looked better on your floor than hers.

Husband and I played house – arranging and rearranging furniture, rummaging for bits and pieces in second-hand markets, painting and scrubbing, shining up the place, making it home, a home we may or may not ever share on a permanent basis. I would come to think of the house as our late baby, that last-minute one couples had in an attempt to rescue a flagging relationship. We were building a new nest, but who were we building it for?

Soon it was time for Husband to leave, to return to the land he called home, to resuming gazing at the view he loved from the same old window, the window I had drawn a curtain over.

Parting was harder than I thought.

At the airport’s ten-minute drop-off zone, Husband heaved his pink-and-white floral suitcase out of the boot – a birthday gift he’d once given me that I refused to have anything to do with. But Husband, a practical type, was not easily embarrassed.

A quick hard hug and he was gone, bustling off to Terminal D wheeling his silly pink suitcase, looking like Miss Venezuela.

At the entrance he turned and waved – not a romantic movie-farewell type wave, more of an urgent flapping.

Perhaps he’d changed his mind. Perhaps he was missing me already. Perhaps he wanted to stay. And in that moment, I’d have taken him and his pink suitcase back in a heartbeat.

I opened the car window. ‘WHAT?’

‘DON’T SMOKE IN THE CAR! OR THE HOUSE!’

With that he turned and disappeared inside the terminal. I couldn’t wait to see the back of him.

It was dark by the time I got back to the crumbly stone house on a long and winding road through unfamiliar hamlets that briefly flared in the black emptiness of the surrounding countryside, past the undulating vineyards, along the twisty unlit lanes with their deep, invisible ditches and down the bumpy track that led to the house that I could not quite yet call home.

It was very quiet out there in the countryside: no cars whooshing by, no lights twinkling in the inky sky beyond the still curtain-less windows, no humans in sight or sound, just strange animal noises – an owl’s hoot, a sudden scurry across the roof. I turned on the lamps and poured a whisky. I heated up a frozen pizza and ate my half. Then I remembered Husband was gone and ate his half. I sprawled on the couch and lit a cigarette.

At last, I was alone; at last, I’d been left alone. This was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it?

*

It didn’t take long to see that my new life was going to be somewhat different from how I’d imagined it – there were impediments I’d failed to consider, angles I’d overlooked. I’d never lived outside a city or done any gardening or lain awake at night worrying about the shrinking bee population. I’d only ever thought of nature, in so far as I thought of it at all, as something you had to drive through to get somewhere. I was scared of cows and anything that flapped, scuttled, buzzed, slithered or moved faster than me. This was most things, including a local farmer’s ancient mother who’d come tearing past me in her battered matchbox car with no lights or side mirrors, accompanied by a miniature dog that seemed permanently stuck to the passenger window, probably by G-forces.

I bought an electric tennis racket for swatting things, which improved my backhand but had little effect on the fly population. When I was doing housework, I carried a can of spider killer in the pocket of the Coronation Street housecoat I’d bought in my local supermarket as a jokey conceit – I couldn’t believe people still wore such get-ups unironically. As my urban life receded and I passed the days sweeping up builders’ dust and beetles, the Coronation Street housecoat stopped being amusing and became the most indispensable garment in my wardrobe. When fired at point-blank range, the spider spray would blow back in my face, causing me to cough uncontrollably: it probably took five years off my life, never mind the planet’s, but it was preferable to being set upon by giant furballs with legs. I didn’t understand why seemingly intelligent people said dumb things like ‘they’re harmless’ when spiders were a major cause of strokes and heart attacks, or ‘they’re more scared of you than you are of them’. How did they know? Had they asked a tarantula?

The countryside seethed with perils they never showed you in those romantic French period dramas in idyllic rustic settings. Nature was only there to provide atmosphere – a chocolate-box backdrop to the action, which generally revolved around sex and family feasts at long tables under plane trees with accordion music and a bit of slap and tickle under the table. Nobody in rustic French period dramas sat around furiously scratching mosquito bites in their nether regions. In rustic French period dramas when actresses in heaving bodices threw themselves down on the hay, the only thing likely to jump out at them was Johnny Depp.

One morning I woke up itching like a mad woman and looked down to see dozens of livid, suppurating bites all over my body. I went to see the village doctor, who took one look at these volcanic eruptions and asked if I’d been lying in any long grass lately. Clearly, he could not have mistaken me for a French actress. When I said I certainly had not been lying in long grass, he said, ‘Well, anyway, you have aoûtats.’ Aoûtats, I learned, were vicious little mites, invisible to the naked eye and very common around these parts in August. Mind you, he whistled, this was one of the worst cases he’d ever seen. He sent me on my way with a tube of cortisone cream and said, ‘Are you sure you haven’t been lying in long grass?’

Sometimes, my rustic paradise felt more like living in a David Attenborough documentary. I began to wonder whether nature and I would ever get along.

*

There were other obstacles I’d failed to properly consider in my hormonally charged haste to get away from my former life. For instance, it turned out I only thought I could speak French. The old-school phrase books I’d dusted off proved quite useless in twenty-first-century France, or twenty-first-century anywhere: ‘Is this the smoking section of the aircraft?’ ‘Where is the public telephone?’ ‘Yugoslavia is a beautiful country.’ ‘I would like to send a telegram.’

I’d always loved French, a language that made everyone sound as if they were lying in bed smoking after mindblowing sex. This, unfortunately, was not how I sounded. I developed a way of speaking fast, in a mash-up of tenses and made-up words, filling in the gaps with shrugs and grimaces I copied from real French people. But I had a good ear and could do a reasonable impersonation of a French accent; consequently, no one understood a thing I said, but they’d get a wary look, as if they might have missed something.

Without the benefit of pantomime shrugs and grimaces, phone calls were more challenging.

I’d leave messages on the electrician’s answerphone: ‘Salutations! The television cannot walk. Please come to watch it very soon. I embrace you!’

My new next-door neighbours embraced me with open arms, but let me get away with nothing. Monsieur C spoke reasonably good English, but Madame C, who had only learned schoolgirl English, which was about as effective as learning schoolgirl French, spoke none to speak of. Why would she? She was French, we were in France. It was funny how English-speakers appeared stunned when they found out that not all foreigners spoke English. I tried to imagine a French visitor to rural Wales being astounded to discover that not everyone in Tiddletown spoke French.

‘You must learn to speak properly,’ said Madame C. ‘I’ll help you.’ She might have been a country woman, but she had a worldly sense of humour.

‘Are you finished?’ she’d say when my lips stopped moving. ‘You’re hurting my ears.’ She’d clap her hands over her ears in case I hadn’t understood, then make me conjugate avoir two hundred times.

Madame and Monsieur C took me under their wing: they introduced me to everyone who was anyone in the village, which, being a community of 149 registered voters, was pretty much everyone. They guided me through the Olympian paperwork the French excelled at and took over making phone calls on my behalf to builders and plumbers and the electrician – apparently by popular demand. They undertook my education in local customs, including how to stack four tonnes of wood by forming a human chain, how to serve dinner in the right order and how to exercise caution on the roads because French drivers were zippy and liked to be in front. One evening they took me to a raffle where the first prize was a donkey. I don’t think I’d ever been so happy not to win anything in my life.

One morning Monsieur C called and said he was taking me to see the Tour de France. The legendary cycling race would be coming through a nearby village that afternoon. ‘Bring a shopping bag,’ he said mysteriously.

The peloton passed in a disappointing three-minute blur that blew my new straw hat into the road. But the real entertainment was the warm-up act – the la caravane publicitaire. This comprised a cavalcade of sponsors’ trucks that thundered through the villages and towns ahead of the riders, flinging assorted freebies and foodstuffs into the cheering crowds lining the route. The caravane was a sort of French version of the Roman Games with salami sticks instead of slaves. It was, said Monsieur C, limbering up and snapping his shopping bag, by far the best part of the Tour. ‘How else do you think they get so many people out on the streets for the TV cameras?’ From my early observations of local life and culture, French people came out on the streets at the drop of a strike and hardly needed further encouragement. But as the noisy swell of onlookers jostled for the prime positions on the normally sleepy main street, I got quite caught up in all the excitement.

A current fizzed through the crowd as a van with a colossal saucisson on the roof came hurtling around the corner and invisible hands threw packets of mini sausages at us. People went crazy, shoving and scuffling for the little foil bags. Hard on the wheels of the sausage truck came a row of giant vegetables, a basket of dancing baguettes and a revolving milkshake the size of a small building. ‘Nesquik!’ yelled the man next to me as he launched himself at an airborne box of chocolate milk. A police van appeared, blue lights flashing. For a moment I thought the gendarmerie were about to do a bit of crowd control, but then they started throwing things at us as well. Fridge magnets bearing the national police logo rained down on our heads. People practically trampled the barricades to get at them. The freebies kept coming at us thick and fast – caps, keyrings, hard-boiled sweets, hotel pens. It was all quite shameless and totally exhilarating and eventually even I found myself in a tussle for a bottle of mineral water that had been launched like a missile from the Vittel truck. I spied Monsieur C coming up for air, clutching an armful of booty which we divided up between our shopping bags. As we inspected our bruises and the jewel in our crown, a giant foam hand, compliments of a local bookie, Monsieur C clicked his tongue: before the global economic crisis of 2008, he said, they gave away much better stuff; one year, someone got a racing bike.

Next year, I would wear a helmet.

In the beginning, I was busy: setting up house, meeting new people, driving on the wrong side of the road, finding my way around the exotically...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Fifty
• Mental!
• Mortal!
• Face Time
• Hair Is Not for Sissies
• Drugs Used to Be Fun
• Lifestyle Choices
• Big Swinging Chicks
• Fashion Forward
• The Silence of the Wolves
• Womance
• Old Married Couples
• New Romantics
• In the Family Way
• Living the Dream
• Sixty
• Epiphanies
• The Fuck-It List
• Acknowledgements