I look at my laughter lines and mutter: 'Nothing’s that funny'

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/23/laughter-lines-iain-duncan-smith-work-funny-lucy-mangan

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Monday

I need varifocals. I make noises of extreme contentment as I sit down and extreme discontent as I get up off the sofa. It takes 20 minutes every morning before I feel my joints are truly working smoothly. I look at the laughter lines on my face in the mirror and mutter: “Nothing’s that funny.” In the shower, I can’t turn round enough to perform vital ablutions with ease, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me just say enjoy it while you can.

I am 45. And a healthy, well-fed, unbowed-by-any-years-of-manual-labour-or-physical-caring-responsibilities 45. And yet apparently, according to the Tory thinktank the Centre for Social Justice chaired by diabolical golf ball Iain Duncan-Smith, we can and should all be working until well into our 70s. It recommends raising the current pension age from 65 to 70 by 2028 and to 75 by 2035. By that age I will almost certainly be one giant stiffened joint being rolled to and from a garage for industrial lubricant to be applied once a week.

Iain Duncan Smith wants us to work until we drop. But we are not machines | Stefan Stern

The former pensions minister Lady Altmann called the proposal “chilling and immoral”, which is true, but before you even get to that it’s just batshit crazy. It’s like nobody in the thinktank has ever encountered a human body before. I mean, I was taught all my life that Tories were subhuman (not saying that’s the best way to bring a child up, but on the other hand if you’re raising one in the late 70s and early 80s it does explain a lot of things succinctly for it). After some initial confusion, I realised it was metaphorical, but if they can envisage a population that can work in sufficient numbers in sufficient sectors to bring in the extra £182bn they reckon this current wheeze will yield, I perhaps should lower myself carefully into a chair and reconsider.

Tuesday

The contestant lineup for this year’s series of Great British Bake Off has been revealed, and all is as it should be. A tentful of hopefuls, assembled and preparing to reveal to us once more that behind even the most unassuming mien can beat the chantilly-filled, marzipan heart of a patisserie goddess, can lie the spirit of a bread lion (see Paul Jagger’s series six creation that lives on in the minds of later generations) or sugar-spinner so adept that his gravity-defying emanations amount to sorcery.

I watch GBBO every autumn like a squirrel stores nuts for the winter. I tuck away the little nuggets of goodness that play out on screen every week – the camaraderie, the striving, the creation of things so much greater than the sum of their parts thanks to ineffable talent, ingenuity and artistry of their makers – and consume them over the rest of the year to bolster me when the otherwise total arsery of the world threatens to overwhelm.

Welcome back, my friends. We have great need of you.

Wednesday

Whenever I think – or more accurately, am required to think by the exigencies of my job or other external circumstances – about the sexbot industry, two things always come to mind. First is the famous scene in Portnoy’s Complaint involving the piece of liver. Second is the column Julie Burchill once wrote, in this very newspaper no less, claiming that men would have sex with mud if there was nothing else around and the letter the paper then received from a man who had done exactly that.

And I grudgingly admire an industry that has looked at this very low bar and still gone to the trouble of – uh – erecting entire robots around it when a box of offal or a rainy day would basically suffice.

Jeanette Winterson, however, is not happy. After researching AI and sexbottery for her latest novel, Frankisstein, she warns that girls and women need to start learning to code and shape the coming world tout de damn suite otherwise the future is likely to be even worse than the past, especially in terms of sexual liberation and satisfaction for women.

So, happy hump day, as it were!

Thursday

Royal-warranted chemist – though we are about to stretch the meaning of that word to the absolute limits of its elasticity – Ainsworths is selling homeopathic tablets made of the Berlin Wall as an aid to dealing with emotional trauma. By breaking down the walls we build within ourselves in response to it, do you see?

I am consumed by indecision. If we grant that, as claimed, the pills do contain actual Berlin Wall dust instead of – as with traditional homeopathy – the mere memory of the “active” ingredient, does that make it less of a con than usual? Or is the fact that the chicanery is merely transposed – the memory that does you good now inheres to the stuff itself – make it even worse?

Before you start weeping, though, do let the following comfort you: superfoodies and clean eaters were warned this week that eating too much flax seed puts them at risk of cyanide poisoning. Darwinian justice may yet come to all.

Friday

“Scorn pain,” said Seneca. “Either it will go away or you will.”

This is unnecessarily verbose. My husband is ill, and I’ve got it down to “Just go away.”

I am the daughter of a doctor. We don’t take anything short of multiple compound fractures or visible tumours seriously. You crack on. Anyone who merely coughs and splutters is – ironically – dead to us. Those who cough, splutter and then moan and groan about the coughing and spluttering and wish to explain how they feel while they are coughing and spluttering, and describe the inner aftermath in minute detail – these we are in danger of killing with our own hands.

Every time I enter the bedroom I am greeted with an update of his symptoms, without a hint of shame or embarrassment. I can’t bear it. We wouldn’t blot the escutcheon by articulating our suffering if our lives – I guess as they one day might – depended on it. It might be permissible to make a pre-emptive request for the undertaker, but I’d have to check.

“It’s like there’s a cold fire burning inside me,” he says at one point in the hollow whisper he has adopted for the duration. “I know the feeling,” I say.