Spooky, isn’t it, how time goes? One minute you’re cracking open the monkey nuts in your sweaty Incredible Hulk mask, dunking for apples in your disco pants, dancing down the bonfire-lit road in a ghostly bed sheet with your Bay City Rollers scarf wrapped around your waist, and knocking on Halloween-decorated doors for sour apples and salty Tayto. And then, a couple of lunar cycles later, you’re dragging your saggy ass through the doors of Dublin’s RDS for the Over-50s Show.
Oh, what larks, Pip, what larks.
I went to the exhibition – purely for the purposes of research, you understand – and came home with a paper bag full of off-season hotel-break offers and brochures for golfing in the Algarve, many of them featuring solid orthopaedic flip-flop wearers enjoying the gracious autumn sunshine. I also left with two pillows made out of bamboo and shredded panda, or some such. (The woman said I’d sleep the sleep of the dead on them, and wake up as fragrant and supple as a eucalyptus branch.)
I also bought a nifty little eyebrow dye set from a fragrant young woman called Jacinta (sculpted eyebrows being a poor man’s facelift).
Then another young lady, who looked as if she had been sprinkled with fairy dust, gave me a non-surgical eye lift. It was more fun than it ought to have been: I sat in a high chair while she applied a magic cream, made of unicorn excreta and air kisses, to one of my puffy eye sockets, then waved a fan at my face, drying the skin into a youthfully tight little sling. And hey presto, under one eye I was as smooth as a hardboiled egg, while my other side looked vaguely scrambled.
Bingo in a midlands hotel
It seems kind of arbitrary and non-specific, pitching a show to the over-50s, given that this demographic covers about half the population. I know people in their 30s who couldn’t think of anything nicer than a midweek singalong and a game of bingo in a midlands hotel, and I know 70-year-olds who’d impale you on their stilettos at the very hint of that creaking old phrase “golden years”.
There was a vaguely uneasy mix in the cavernous hall between medical accoutrements and lifestyle choices, between devices for ear-wax removal and others for shredding carrots, between tinnitus management and toaster bags, and between libido support supplements and leatherette trousers, all of which were available on the day.
Rheumatic hands
Anyway, just when I thought things couldn’t get any more exciting – shirts with clever poppers for rheumatic hands, velcro slippers for swollen feet, a whole variety of stairlifts and massage cushions and antidotes for bunions, not to mention boxes of belly-fat removal supplements and enchanting little glass denture holders that looked like miniature coffins for Sleeping Beauty – there was Dicky Rock, materialising out of the camphor-scented ether, looking tanned and coiffed and lovely.
I was considering cantering down the aisles of exhibits to ask him to sign my box of vitamin-enriched bran flakes, en route to a demonstration on the efficacy of a non-stick pan (hey, you think your life is a barrel of laughs), when I was nabbed by an eager chiropractor.
He tapped a couple of vertebrae, straightened out my shoulders and enumerated a list of possible symptoms I might be experiencing due to being old enough to remember how to do the hucklebuck, each of which could be relieved by the application of a spring-loaded gun to my spine.
Digestive problems? Dizziness? Tingling fingers? Spots in front of your eyes? Ringing in your ears? “No,” I hissed, backing away and into a table sporting two sculptural, rubbery lumps, both the colour of dry honey. They felt oddly pleasurable when you picked them up, like digging your fingers into cold suet.
“That’s what 1lb of body fat looks like,” said the slim and smiling woman behind the display table. “And the larger of the two is what 5lb of fat looks like.”
“Thank you,” I said to her, and fled.
All fish oils are not created equal, I learned from a helpful poster on that balmy Saturday, and I suspect, too, that not all quinquagenarians are equal to being offered an extra-oral examination of their mastication muscles or another botanical formulation to deal with their irritable bowels or spouses.
Still, I’ll be there again next year, if only to get my other eye non-surgically unscrambled.