Life after 50.

Mariella Frostrup: life after 50 | Life and style | The Guardian:
‘Better diet and general health mean we’re living longer and more youthfully,’ says Mariella.

"Hitting 50 is traumatic. Even as an agony aunt, regularly confronted with irrational human foibles, knowing that you have more years behind you than ahead can be the catalyst for extreme angst. I approached my landmark birthday eyes shut tight, hurtling headlong into the dark with my fingers crossed. Only this time, it really was dark. No matter how sanguine you are about our inevitable trek towards a terminal conclusion, hitting 50 is a shocker. A morbid sense of a life already half gone and the mourning of the many opportunities that had receded into the past made the idea of any “celebration” seem masochistic.

Long-anticipated plans for the mother of all knees-ups, complete with dancing and speeches and tears and disgraceful behaviour, were shelved in favour of a quick drink with my friend Amy, followed by dinner with my husband. Luckily the two had organised a surprise dinner that rescued the day from total tragedy. But the wide-eyed, glassy, congratulatory smiles of those around the table still some distance from their 50s provided further proof of the terrible precipice I was apparently stepping over. When The Book Show, my only regular TV project, was shelved shortly afterwards it felt like I really had hit a life low. Restoring a house in Somerset so we could move the family out of town became my preoccupation. It helped me dodge the pity and try to unravel my feelings of failure and dispensability.
I didn’t seek help for what felt at times like terminal despond, a state I was neither familiar with nor able to shrug off. My instincts led me along a self-indulgent path, finding solace in solitude, long walks spent contemplating who I really was now that youth and forward momentum were no longer my stalwarts. Embracing 40 had been about making seismic changes to my lifestyle, but at 50 the upheaval was all internal.
Struggling with a combination of existential crisis and physical change as we enter our sixth decade seems unavoidable, but according to the biodynamic psychotherapist Fiona Arrigo, it can be a catalyst, too, for “leading far richer lives”. Good news when what you really feel like is taking up residence in a softly lit cave. (Arrigo’s is a philosophy born out by the figures, with 15% of women and men in their 60s saying they’ve never felt better and 59% feeling content). The greatest obstacle to equilibrium is our reticence to change, encouraged by a society that regards clinging on to the raft of youth, long after it’s splintered and fallen to pieces, as the only way to stay afloat. A more appropriate response would be to let the currents carry us and simply enjoy the ride.
It’s no coincidence that the unhappiest of my generation are often those afraid to evolve away from the fashions, ambitions and lifestyles of their earlier years. Certainly my darkest days have been when I’ve dwelled on youth, rather than embraced maturity. Arrigo describes the qualities needed to face this transformation period as “fluidness, adaptability and allowing yourself to be open to reinvention, learning more about who you are and above all not being scared!” I’d normally be sceptical about new-age musings, but here I’m in total agreement. Maybe it’s maturity, or desperation; maybe Arrigo is simply right. When this woman says: “I feel better at 60 than I did as a teenager” I actually believe her.
For me, even in the doldrums, a small resistance flickered in my breast.

Was slow decline and a dwindling group of friends really my future for the next 40 years? The propaganda aimed at the over-50s was certainly enough to make euthanasia look like an aspirational escape. Luckily my anniversary copy of Saga, welcoming me to a brave new world of soft food, group trips to heritage sites and Florida cruises, failed to arrive.
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They’re not the only ones unwittingly fast-forwarding the middle-aged direct to retirement. Where once I was the oppressed recipient of an avalanche of designer-sales notices and invites to new restaurant openings, now the only unsolicited advertising I was attracting was for constipation or retirement funding. It could be worse – my friend Don McCullin, the photographer still going strong at 79, is driven demented by junk-mail reminders to plan his funeral. It is a nudge towards oblivion that he prefers to ignore. On television, aside from in gritty dramas, my contemporaries were virtually invisible. When Shane Allen, the BBC’s controller of comedy commissioning, said they were moving away from “menopause comedy”, I for one wasn’t laughing. That’s my generation wiped off the screens, then – apart from Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a curious decree when the majority of TV viewers are actually women my age.
Since my 50th, it’s been like inhabiting two separate worlds: a tangible one filled with energetic, sexy, adventurous, hard-working and active friends in their 50s, and a wider society where neither myself nor my contemporaries seem to exist at all. As my friend Regine Moylett, 55, the manager of Damon Albarn and the Clash, puts it: we’ve moved from “trophy to atrophy” in the eyes of the wider world. Politicians don’t talk to us, advertisers ignore us, we aren’t sold music or movies, fashion or cosmetics, aside from “miracle” creams promising to reduce wrinkles so we dare show our unsightly faces in public. Mutton, the novel by India Knight, opens with an apposite comic moment as her heroine prepares to pass a building site and is greeted, not by the anticipated and slightly dreaded wolf whistles from the merry crew of labourers, but total, devastating silence. Such invisibility, and not just from construction workers, is the reality for many.
In the crepuscular light of my fading star, I bumped into Robert Campbell, an old friend and veteran of the advertising industry. He had also recently turned 50 and, as it turned out, was not prepared to go down without a tussle. Having been assaulted online the day before by a loud and unsolicited advert for panty liners playing on my computer, while an 18-year-old was trying to fix it, I was already on a war footing with the negative stereotyping of my generation. “Join me,” he urged. “I’ve just started a little company called High50, we’re going to start a revolution among the over-50s.”
“What’s the philosophy behind it?” I asked.
“We don’t touch it if it smells of wee,” he laughed.

‘We look and feel 20 years younger than the previous generation did at our age’: Sandra Bullock recently turned 50. Photograph: Jeff Vespa/WireImage
The over-50s aren’t in need of sympathy, what we really need is a makeover. With role models from Michelle Obama to Elle Macpherson, our determination not to disappear into the obscurity of village fetes and terminally slow yoga classes couldn’t be clearer. Attitudes toward us are stuck way back in the dark ages and so again we babyboomers are pushing into new frontiers. The over-50s now own a remarkable 80% of the nation’s wealth, so it seems commercially suicidal that only 4% of UK advertising is aimed at us. Contrary to popular opinion, we have no brand loyalty and can be enticed as easily as any teenager, the difference being we have the money to pay for what we want. At the forefront, unusually, is the beauty world, which recognised that only mature adults can afford their products. They have lined up the likes of Jerry Hall, Twiggy, Tilda Swinton and Kristin Scott Thomas as public faces for major cosmetic houses. It’s the first indication that the commercial world is waking up to what they stand to lose by cold-shouldering a third of the population.
Movie stars such as Julianne Moore, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Sandra Bullock all recently turned 50, offering the possibility that bifocals and sensible shoes aren’t our only future accessories. They may set the bar higher than we mortals can possibly aspire to, but better diet and general health mean we’re living longer and more youthfully; we look and feel 20 years younger than the previous generation did at our age, without resorting to plastic surgery.
For evidence of our commercial and cultural clout, the “quinoa” revolution of fat-reducing, grain-embracing, juice-imbibing midlifers is hard to beat. According to analyst Claire Enders, whose recent YouGov/Enders Analysis poll is full of good news for my age group, the demographic we share our closest links to aren’t retirees but teenagers. Our hormones are raging, we’re interested in pleasing ourselves and the rest of the world be damned. No wonder I felt so at home at my friend’s son’s 18th the other night, though arriving late, drunk and demanding “songs with a chorus” is still an uncomfortable flashback.

At least I wasn’t chasing the younger partygoers, unlike some of my male companions. Then again with 70% of women over 50 preferring a good night’s sleep and only 39% of men feeling similar, perhaps they have good cause. Nevertheless, chasing youth, literally or physically, is not conducive to contented maturity. When catching sight of yourself in the mirror feels like an unwelcome assault, the answer has to be to look less often and invest in kinder lighting. The achievable goal of looking the best you can, rather than as you once did, should be a 50-something mantra.
Whether it’s the 66% of over-50s who feel a good sex life is important, the 81% who feel positive about their age, or the 53% who go on luxury holidays more than three times a year, this new power group is full of surprises. With an election coming up political parties might want to note that 85% of over-50s always or usually vote. Echoing our consumer tendencies we are swing voters, choosing our political allegiances not based on party loyalty, but by pragmatism and personal choice, according to High50’s 50+ project, yet find me the politician who speaks to us directly.
Recent “incentives” for mature voters suggest the prime minister needs reminding that we’re not pensioners looking for handouts, but a powerful lobby group demanding recognition. Patronising, ageist rhetoric won’t gain our votes.
Judging by the analysis, reaching 50 should be the high point of our lives, a midway punctuation where self-assurance, maturity, hard work and emotional confidence pay off and pave the path to better enjoy the second chapter of our earthly tenure. So why is it such a debilitating blow for so many? The answer can only be the prevailing discriminatory attitudes, out of touch with the fast-paced changes taking place as lifespans increase.
The government has designated 70 as the new retirement age, but where are the employers queuing for mature employees, the companies taking on 50-something women returned from mothering to the workforce? If we’re not welcome at work and the state can’t afford to keep us, just what are we all meant to do with these endlessly increasing lifespans that see us healthy, happy and energetic well into our 70s? It’s the million-dollar question nobody is addressing.
For my generation, disparaged by cultural forces and overlooked by workplaces that have yet to value our contribution, it can feel like the beginning of terminal redundancy. Ageism, the last surviving “ism” of the 20th century, feels not only intact but unchallenged.
We’re used to shouting about such injustice – particularly women – but having inherited the “right to work” from our feminist mothers and fought for basic human rights, equal pay and gender equality, we could do with a break.
Instead, we hit the menopause. Ignorance and embarrassment are the two words that best describe prevailing attitudes to a “condition” that makes its presence felt when our fertility ends. Up-to-date treatment for the plethora of symptoms that can afflict us during this period of hormonal change is hard to come by unless you’re super-rich. I’ve paid thousands of pounds over my working life to a private health-care provider in the expectation of swift and cutting-edge care when I needed it most, but during menopause women are denied cover in the small print of every major health-insurer’s policy documents. Treatment is refused for myriad symptoms, from headaches to sleeplessness, anxieties to memory loss. When I asked AXA PPP for cover to investigate my insomnia and palpitations, the response was an unwelcome surprise. “We don’t cover it,” I was told flatly. “It’s natural.”

According to the company representative, if I’d been consulting a shrink rather than a gynaecologist I’d stand a better chance. So better mad than menopausal.
Those reliant on the beleaguered health service fare slightly better in that HRT is made available. But none of the other treatments, from testosterone to adrenal stimulation, sleep and anti-anxiety drugs – all the fine tuning that can make the difference between a sex-life or agonising insomnia, fitness or weight gain, healthy energy levels or indolence – are on offer. Most women wade through this hormonal bedlam alone, too ashamed to discuss it. Meanwhile, men, experiencing a less dramatic convergence of physical change, get barely a look-in with their symptoms.
Having brought up the “M” word in public, following my insurance company dust-off, I was surprised by approaches from total strangers, on the street, on the subway, and even out at night, those who would gaze into my eyes, squeeze my hand and whisper “You’re so brave” intimately into my ear. I hadn’t survived a war or a terrorist attack, battled against cancer, or saved a drowning dog. It’s an area where even feminists fear to tread, thanks to its suggestions of an arid landscape of redundant organs and hysterical tendencies. Having our worth totted up in childbearing and rearing for millennia has caused us to view the close of that chapter as a mini death.
Personally, having passed the 50 milestone and navigated just a fraction of the destruction it can wreak on your sense of self-worth and sanity, I’m ready to start popping the champagne corks and cancelling my useless health-insurance policy.

“I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” said Mick Jagger when he was an ancient 31. He’s not the only one to have learnt the benefit of hindsight. When I was 10 years younger than Sir Mick I set my retirement date for a company pension at 55. It was inconceivable then that I’d still be upright, let alone working, at such an advanced age. Now I’m three years away from that policy maturing and decades from any desire to shuffle off into the gloaming. Like many of my generation I won’t be retiring on the near-worthless proceeds.
At 52 I’m feeling more confident, less insecure and more devil may care than ever. I can hear my husband groan! You could argue that the spirit of punk, the soundtrack to my early years, lives on, not in spotty youths, but in those reaching 50 today. Yet this confidence to express what we think and feel is also dismissed with the stereotype of “grumpy old men and women”. Meryl Streep put it succinctly recently when she said: “I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’m arrogant, but simply because I’ve reached a stage in life where I don’t want to waste time with what displeases me or hurts me.”
One hundred years ago there was little to excite the palate about middle age. Women disappeared into their parlours, men sported potbellies and nostril hair, children had plenty to revolt against. Look at us now, from the latest Bond girl, Monica Bellucci, to the world’s most desirable man, George Clooney. There’s been a social revolution, quiet, forceful and emphatic, that’s only slowly making its impact felt outside its immediate beneficiaries. There are more small business start-ups among the over-50s than any other generation, so whether it’s taking risks you would previously have cowered from or rejecting the impulse to hang on to the baggage of youth, the challenges and rewards of later life are there for the taking. Dylan Thomas perhaps proffered the best instruction to “rage against the dying of the light”. I’m tempted to organise that knees-up for my 60s instead."
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