Age is another A

Age:

Lamb dressed as mutton. Mutton dressed as lamb. In the end, the mutton ends up in pies and the lamb ends up on the white china plates of some London restaurant! Mutton is terrible and chewy anyway, and lambs are best used for making a delicious jacket or boots or something. Besides, both contain calories- a no-no when it comes to eating. So I will not talk about the mutton dressed as lamb thing, because I assume you people are not sheep. I hope you are not. There are some people that do tend to look like sheep, I admit. I had the displeasure of being on the street last year, where an overweight lady in a floral dress came barging through the usual barrage of photographers, trying to talk to me. She had facial hair. The hair on the top of her head resembled a cross between a toilet brush and sheep’s wool. She had jowls. Perhaps we could call her a sheep. But non non non, I hope you are not that lady. If you are, there is no hope for you.

I am not going to talk about sheep, or animals or any sort. I am simply going to tell you a terrifying story:

There was once a lady who was forty years old, or about that. She harboured delusions that she was twenty- possibly younger, maybe seventeen. Every morning, she would get up and put on the shiny black leggings which the young people wore two years ago (I still see the young people wear these leggings today, but they are not the chic youth with whom I associate.) Her fat dumpling legs looked like sausages wrapped in black foil- not that she noticed, our blind and demode woman. She would see a beautiful young twenty year old woman in the mirror instead. The woman would then put on a checked shirt, not noticing her arms jiggling because the sleeves were unflattering. She would straighten her hair to give he impression of some dead skunk, and place wayfarer sunglasses over her eyes; as if to declare her blindness to the world. She would waddle out into the street, where she would glance in admiration in the shop windows, at her imaginary-chic-figure. The shopkeepers, all stylish to the nines- in fact, stylish to the nineties, would stare at this bizarre figure of a woman who had wrinkles all over her blotched skin, wobbling arms and legs trapped in some sort of sausage roll. Ah, the delusion of being young, hmm? We are only young for so long, and there is nothing wrong with ageing. But one must dress appropriately. I hope that story terrified you enough.

On the other hand, a young person dressing as somebody more…mature, can be rather terrible as well. For instance, I see five-year-olds walk around Paris in fur coats carrying cigarette holders. I asked one of these 5-year-olds: “is there a surplus of fur coats and cigarette holders in Paris at the moment?”
The five-year-old blew just cigarette smoke at my pants (5-year-old aren’t very tall these days), and looked at me through his monocle slightly contemptuously. His date, a 5-and-a-half-year-old in her red Yves Saint Laurent dress and 7-inch heels pouted at me. I stared them down. It’s simply too young an age to be wearing fur coats- one should wait till at least 8. I told he 5 year old this, and he tried to rationalise it:
“You see, monsieur Lagerfeld, fur coats for children such as us use less material than an adult’s fur coat. It is cheaper.”
“But we’re all children, are we not?”
“Some of us are bigger children than others” he retorted.
“Ah, but since we are both agreed to be children, a fur coat should be cheap for me too.”
“But big children like to spend lots of money on things,” the 5 year old said.
“I like very cheap things and very expensive things. Fur is from dead animals, no? The value of the animal is already gone- it is dead- so that is why it is so cheap.”
“True, true, Monsieur Lagerfeld.”

Later on I was walking to the Chanel atelier where I came across a rather plumb 6 year old with a cigar and a top hat standing outside the atelier. I took the cigar out of his mouth, and stamped on it with vigour. I told him to buy gloves. So you see, it is very dangerous to dress in a mature fashion if you are young.

The final thing to say here, is that many of the people these days are getting plastic injected into their bodies. We are made mostly of water- not plastic- this is why we are not Barbie dolls and Ken dolls and Batman figurines. Some people feel that plastic surgery makes them look younger. It is a way to cheat age, they say. All they are doing is cheating themselves- we call all see if someone has plastic covering their body, just as a child can see that Batman is wearing a suit, or one of those terrible comic book villains has a metal arm and such. It is just as obvious to have a metal arm with a laser attached, as it is to have plastic attached to one’s self. Why, these plastic-people might as well attach plastic bags to their breasts and margarine containers attached to their face!