Esther McCarthy: Getting older just means I’m still alive — I'm privileged to be here

Esther McCarthy: "I want to look like my best self, but beyond a bit of SPF, keeping an eye on my roots, and creative contouring, I don’t really have the time, money, or inclination to actually do anything more about it." Picture: Emily Quinn

I had a birthday recently. And a few people inquired if it was a roundy one. “The nerve! How very dare you!!” was my outraged reply, clutching my pearls at my saggy decolletage, as if they’d suggested I was for camogie players having to wear skorts or something. But it did make me ponder why my gut reaction was one of such indignation.

I’m pro-positive ageing, you guys. My attitude has always been “aren’t I privileged to be here?” Coming from a family where longevity hasn’t been an outstanding trait, I do have respect and gratitude that I’ve made it this far.

But every second social media post on my feed is about collagen, face creams, and age-defying products. The latest one is scalp oil. It’s not bad enough I have to get wrinkles worrying about my crow’s feet, now my scabby scalp has to look young too? 

Where will it END? I’m as vain and shallow as the next person (as long as the next person isn’t that mum who wears full makeup, airwrapped hair extensions, and high heels at the school drop-offs. How I loathe her. Do the decent thing and look like a half-boiled potato like the rest of us, you wench.)

Look, I’m GLAD I’m getting older, but I want to look as well as I can, without going down the Botox/puffylips/putty-filler route (so far...I retain the right to change my mind when my eyelids get so hooded I look like a basset hound in a wind tunnel.)

I want to look like my best self, but beyond a bit of SPF, keeping an eye on my roots, and creative contouring, I don’t really have the time, money, or inclination to actually do anything more about it. In my head, I look fabulous, daahlings, does that count?

The menfolk don’t have to put up with this rubbish. A dude gets to my age, if he hasn’t too much of a pot belly, can hold his farts for an appropriate release location, and his back hair isn’t plait-able, he’s a catch.

Meanwhile, we’re expected to wax, thread, tuck, trim, inject, peel, squeeze, and repel the very laws of time itself? Computer says no. Computer says feck off.

I really am grateful to still be on this earth, surviving decades in this brilliant, slightly battered body. I’ve had four near-death experiences, y’all. Four times I thought: This is it. Like Monty Python’s parrot. She has ceased to be, expired and gone to her maker. This is an ex-Esther.

The first was when I fell off a cliff. Now I don’t talk about this much, ( “Yeah, RIGHT”– everyone who’s ever met me), but I fell 120ft, that’s 40m, or about the height of Cork’s Shandon Tower, off a dried-out waterfall in Australia, on to a big rock, then into the water, where I realised I’d survived the fall but couldn’t move from my neck down and was now, in fact, drowning.

My life, perhaps in a disappointing cliche, flashed before my eyes, like a film reel, but it felt like forever, like I was falling in slow motion, as my mind flicked through everything from being a baby to that moment and the biggest feeling was one of overwhelming regret that it was ending so soon. 

I was going mad that my last words were “Oh, fuck!” as I dropped off the edge after clinging on as long as I could. I got rescued by a helicopter, hospitalised, then moved to a rehab centre to adjust to life in a wheelchair, after breaking my back and my hip.

But hey ho, it all worked out well enough for me to find myself in Hawaii just a few months later, walking like a pro, and on a small schooner that was captained by a bit of an eejit who didn’t read the tide right and got us shipwrecked on a reef off Molokai.

The third time I thought I was kapoot, we were on a whale shark spotting boat trip in South Africa, and the boyo driving the boat hadn’t a clue what he was doing, nearly capsizing us trying to get out past the surf. 

We all eventually got in the water, following a pod. I stopped to fix a flipper (mine, not the whale shark’s) and looked around and couldn’t see the rest of the party, or the boat.

The swell was massive, I was surrounded by a wall of waves. I started panicking, screaming, turning in the water for what felt like hours, where below me was a cartilaginous fish the size of a school bus. 

The last thing I’ll see, I thought sadly, as my arms and legs turned to jelly from exhaustion, will be those majestic creatures watching me drown. 

Then the boat appeared and boyfriend, now husband, had to haul my ungainly wetsuited deadweight out of the water because I couldn’t lift my arms. I was bawling and swore to him, as whale sharks as my witness, I would never enter the ocean again.

The fourth time, there were four of us on a speedboat on Lake Barringo in Kenya, surrounded by nonchalant crocs and dozing hippos. We went between a mammy hippo and her baby. The engine cut and wouldn’t start.

“We’ll have to swim for it!” declared one of the lads, who knew he didn’t have to outswim the crocs, he only had to outswim the Irish wan with the bad back. Boyfriend, now husband, got it going just as mama made a rush for us.

So the moral of this story is, never mind about the inherently sexist ageing process, if I ask you to go for a cliff walk or a boat ride, say NO — I want to make that round birthday.