From men to mid life crises, from Botox to Brazilians, from infertility to infidelity, every week Jacqui Leigh gives her personal take on being a fortysomething woman
I don't do parties!
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The first and last time Dan and I went to a party together it was his debut as my boyfriend and he spent most of the evening trapped in a corner being pawed by a group of my drunken raptors female friends.
As the months have passed we’ve managed to blot out that memory and I have stopped thinking about how we might look to other people. Mainly because we spend most of our time hiding from the world under a duvet on the sofa.
So when a close friend of mine invited us both to her 40th a few weeks ago, I thought he’d moan and complain and we’d make our excuses. Instead, with annoying maturity, he insisted that, much as he’d rather stick pins in his eyes, we had to go. (Then he did that male thing of forgetting the whole conversation entirely so that I had to remind him about the party about twenty times).
Anyway, we are going - for a bit anyway - just long enough to show our faces... before we creep off early to salvage the rest of the night.
It’s not just that time with Dan is precious and I don’t feel like sharing. Somewhere along the line - I think around my thirty-fifth birthday - I found out I really didn’t like parties.
This discovery coincided with another, not unrelated, realisation that my tolerance for alcohol had dwindled to nothing. Over several years - during which I punished myself by continuing to drink anyway, I worked out that under strictly controlled conditions I could just about manage a small glass of wine or half a lager without having to pass out, throw up or get a sudden raging headache.
These conditions require me to not be in any way tired or stressed. In addition, I need to line my stomach - ideally with several inches of lard but, being a vegetarian, several kilos of crisps. If I’m really careful to do this I can count on about fifteen minutes of pleasant, relaxed, alcohol induced jolliness before I hit a wall and need to be carried home.
Which means I will never be at the fun end of the table. I will never do anything I regret which I can later turn into a side-splitting dinner party anecdote. I will never properly let my hair down or tell someone what I really think of them or drink anyone under the table - except myself.
Despite the barrage of health warnings, I like the idea of alcohol. Not being able to drink makes me feel excluded from a world of female bonding and cackling laughter. When I commiserate with friends who are hung over I feel like an alien who has just arrived on the planet. To be honest, even hearing about their excesses makes me feel ill.
And so parties are a drag, especially now that we have to actually talk rather than dance or snog. Being sober and having to hold shouty conversations over the music or rack my brains for something amusing to say to people I normally never talk to, or having to struggle to look interested when I can’t really hear - it’s all such bloody hard work.
Plus, my boyfriend is thirty years old. So I know I’m not going to get through this party without any kind of alcohol. Much as I know what’s coming, I knock back a half shandy and then another... and through an inebriated haze I watch Dan, shy but handsome, struggling to hold a conversation with Kara and her husband who keeps giving Dan weird looks, evidently confused that the young person he is talking to is my boyfriend and not my little brother, male nanny or some kind of intern.
And so, having done our duty, we creep out pathetically early and go home to the babysitter, my dad, who is happily watching Newsnight. I feel completely wasted and my Friday night with Dan is shot to pieces. I crawl into bed half clothed and pass out. A bit later on Dan wakes me with a cup of tea and two Nurofen and helps me take off the rest of my clothes. So not entirely a rubbish evening.
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