hairy things.

There was a thing on the radio this morning about another man who has been charged with raping old ladies in their late seventies and eighties! Can you believe it? How can they do that? The poor women. In their eighties!

There was an old lady, not that much older than me, who lived by herself very near here and who was battered to death for her pin number not that long ago. They've never caught the man who did it. Makes you very nervous when you're getting on a bit and living on your own.

Of course, I'm nowhere near eighty. No. Not at all.

Not yet.

There’s one little bit of comfort when I think about it; her house was rather isolated, surrounded by tall trees.  Mine isn’t. It has hedges all around, but the other cottages are close by and it’s a friendly village and you have the reassuring feeling that if you opened the window and shouted, somebody would hear and would dash over to lend a hand. Of course, they might all be away on holiday or you might not be able to get to a window or you might not be able to shout; I believe you can lose your voice if you are very scared, but in principle...

I keep Dennis’s treasured old cricket bat close to the bed now, just in case - though I gather that I might find myself being arrested and charged with assault if I tried to use the thing on a burglar.  

There are some things that have puzzled me about getting older: there are certain things that happen to a woman and they are not all as freely anticipated as long hairs sprouting on your chin or starting to grow a moustache. (Dennis used to pretend to twiddle the ends of a pointy one and joke that I was getting ready to join the RAF if I hadn’t used my tweezers for a while.)  Just one, for example. You don’t just grow white hairs in your eyebrows; you grow great, long, black, wiry ones as well. If you left them alone, you’d start to look like that politician, what was his name? Big bushy eyebrows...  Chancellor of the Exchequer...  Jim. Jim somebody. Definitely began with a ‘J’. John? James? Jeremy?

Oh, no. Denis.

 Denis Healey. Same as my Dennis. Should have remembered that.

And whilst the hair is growing luxuriously all over the face, it is rapidly fizzling out everywhere else. I understand from the magazines they have at my hairdressers that some young women are paying for what they call now ‘Brazilians’ or ‘Landing Strips’ and designs with names like that. If only they would wait they could save themselves a lot of pain and money. To our surprise, many of us older ladies are becoming remarkably on trend.