How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson

Author:Allison Pearson [Allison Pearson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

14

THE COLLEGE REUNION

7.12 pm: How do you feel approaching a college reunion? I mean, you can have your hair highlighted to hide the grey and you can carefully apply concealer on the area under your eyes, where it settles in the fine lines like chalk. You can rummage in your jewellery box and find a ‘statement necklace’ to wear. (And the statement is: ‘I don’t like this neck and would like the old neck back, please.’)

If you are particularly desperate to get into a certain dress, you may go on a crash diet or panic and spend a stupid amount of money having your ‘stubborn areas’ hoovered out over lunchtime. You can be waxed and plucked and purchase fishnet hold-ups on a whim, but when the day dawns you will look in the mirror, the one with the harsh fluorescent light you have been avoiding for some time, and realise this one, inescapable fact: the woman you are taking along tonight to her college reunion is more than a quarter of a century older than the one who graduated.

How did that happen? Time changes everything except something within which is always surprised by change. I forget who said that, but they were dead right, weren’t they? When I was a teenager and I used to hear friends of my mother say, ‘I still feel twenty-one inside’, I was puzzled and a bit embarrassed for them. Beholding those ancient shipwrecks in our lounge, I thought: how could they still feel what I felt? Surely, your mind and your emotions kept pace with your age. To grow older was to be grown-up, and grown-ups were mature. But that doesn’t seem to hold true. Do we shed our younger selves like chrysalises or do they live on inside us, filed away, waiting and waiting for their time to come again?

It’s spitting with rain and there’s a Siberian wind threshing through the trees when I park in the temporary car park just across the road from college. With one hand protecting my blow-dry, I pick my way through the boggy grass, worrying about my fishnet hold-ups, one of which is already trying to make a run for it. Vaguely remember some warning in a magazine about not putting hold-ups on straight after a bubble bath. Why couldn’t I have put on sensible, age-appropriate opaque tights?

Funny thing is, I’m not sure which Kate is going to the drinks reception in the Senior Common Room. Is it the student Kate of 1985, involved in an agonised love triangle and luxuriating in Whitney’s ‘Greatest Love of All’ on the Sony Walkman, whilst secretly drunk on her sexual power over competing suitors? Or is it the Kate of today, mother of teenagers, libido missing, presumed dead, who will turn fifty in three months?

Who’s counting.

7.27 pm: I arranged to meet Debra by the Porter’s Lodge so we could go in together. We shared a set of rooms in our third year (a boyfriend in our first, Two-Time Ted) and

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