Why doesn’t the ageing process affect everyone?

Mar 5 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

‘I DON’T believe it,” insisted a friend in the tones of Victor Meldrew, with the certainty of a medieval abbot proclaiming the flatness of the Earth.

Her incredulity at the revelation that had just escaped my lips was similar to mine at her own announcement that she had once cohabited with a house rabbit.

Poor creature roaming around in the shag pile carpet while longing for a patch of grass and a dandelion or two – further evidence of my suspicion that it is sometimes those who claim to love animals that do them the greatest harm.

Anyway, on further investigation, I discovered it was not my friend who had introduced the bunny to its urban environment but a former housemate, so I’ve re-adjusted my image of her as Cruella de Vil back to somewhere between Brigitte Bardot and Carla Lane.

My own disclosure was of a far less personal nature and was now well and truly trumped by her pet proclamation, but I was pleased by her reaction to it all the same.

Even more so by that of another colleague, whose response at the news of Shakin’ Stevens marking his 60th birthday yesterday was (in a whiny voice worthy of Kevin the Teenager) “No! I wanted to marry him when I was five”.

She then admitted that she used to imagine herself as Mrs Shakey in childhood games.

Such bizarre confessions aside, I have to agree that it is wrong, wrong, wrong that the singer of This Ole House and Green Door is entering his seventh decade, even though I am fully aware that I was still in primary school when my sister and I choreographed a dance to What Do You Wanna Make Those Eyes At Me For.

This makes him four years older than Clive Anderson and, even more implausibly, 18 years older than David Cameron – both men you would imagine were born at the age of 40, with an impossibly mature head on a baby’s body. In the 80s, when he became the UK’s top-selling male singles artist with the first of his 33 Top 40 hits, he seemed, if a little ridiculous, eternally energetic, vibrant and a little bit older than most other pop stars.

In our minds, or at least in mine anyway and probably in that of my worryingly obsessed colleague, he is stuck at 35 – mid toe-tap, with fluffy hair, a black leather jacket and still looking for that girl underneath the mistletoe.

But, in reality, he is prob- ably more like the Ole House, with his hinges needing oiling and his knees getting chilly.

Actually, judging by the pictures on his website, that is simply not true.

He has somehow managed to look as fresh-faced as he did filming Merry Christmas in an Alpine forest and a red woolly scarf.

Why is it that some people seem permanently young and others stuck in middle age from the first flush of youth?

It’s just as hard to imagine crows’ feet ever troubling Ray Quinn’s cherubic expression as it is to visualise Ann Widdecombe as a school girl.

Maybe the apparently world weariest of us are really physically crossed with the troubles of those seemingly bursting with vitality, like a sort of human version of the Picture of Dorian Gray.

Could it be that the lines etched across Clive Anderson’s face do not belong to him at all, but are the side-effects of Amy Winehouse’s last few nights on the town?

Is Kate Moss’s supermodel complexion safe from the ravages of her party lifestyle because Shane McGowan is wearing her vices instead?

And who is responsible for the lines currently positioning themselves on my forehead, I’d like to know, because surely they cannot all be down to red wine and staying up late to watch repeats of the West Wing.

Am I cultivating the ravages of time that should be marking Shakey’s mush?

Or am I the picture to the house rabbit owner’s Dorian Gray?

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk