When do we start lying about our age?

Hello everyone, hope you had a weekend full of sexual favours and party tricks. Here’s yesterday’s column for your perusal over a cup of coffee. Hope you enjoy.

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – BY PAIGE NICK

GETTING ON

It’s my birthday today. Birthdays are awesome. No they suck. No they’re awesome. No they suck! Eish. When you reach a certain age, it’s hard to tell how you feel about them.

They should be good. After all, together with Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/full moon (please insert your own significant religious event here), a birth in the family, a death in the family, and a promotion, birthdays make up one of the four or five truly legitimate excuses one has every year to snog a stranger, punch a cop, and pass out in the bottom of your whisky glass. Fun, sexy party times – good! But they are also indicators that you’re getting that much older – bad!

I just had to figure out how old I am. I couldn’t for the life of me remember if I am thirty six or thirty seven. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to work it out. Fair enough, I’ve never been any good at maths and I don’t know my times tables (except for the tens, those are easy), but still, that’s ridiculous. I had to count back from when I was born and work it out on my fingers, carry the three, minus five, plus four. Am I that old that I don’t remember things anymore, or are there just so many digits building up, that they become hard to keep track of?

All this number crunching got me wondering when it’s appropriate for me to start lying about my age? I’m not feeling the need quite yet, but I sense it’s coming fast. I did a little research on Twitter, and the general consensus is that chicks start lying about their age somewhere around our late thirties, early forties. The desire to be young is strong with us.

And I’d always been under the impression that this was purely our domain, that men don’t have to lie about their numbers, what with the whole aging-well thing they’ve got going on. It’s completely unfair, and they have no right, but men generally do age better than women. Just look at George Clooney, look at David Duchovny, look at Justin Bieber, it’s hard to believe they’re all in their fifties.

But then a girlfriend of mine met this guy online who claimed to be forty five. Some weeks later, when they met in person, it turned out that he was closer to sixty five, and the picture he’d posted online was of his son. When she confronted him with his very obvious deception he claimed he was very young at heart and still felt like he was forty five, so he didn’t think it was that much of a lie. So Mr Man had simply lobbed off twenty years. He was probably concerned that since she’s in her thirties (or so she said), that ‘45’ was her dating cut-off point, and he wanted to come in under that.

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, but it’s kind of nice to know that we’re not the only ones doing the lying here and guys have jumped into the fray.

When I was about six, we were in my mom’s Rover, heading towards De Waal Drive, when a policeman pulled us over. My mom didn’t have her licence on her, and when he asked for her age, to put on the ticket, she refused to tell him. I remember sitting there for what felt like hours, in a Mexican stand-off between the policeman and my mom. Who, being the lady she is, refused to give up either her age or her date of birth, and was completely offended that he even had the gall to enquire. She got the ticket eventually, but he never got her age. She would have sooner gone to jail than tell him that. It was the principle of the matter; she told us later, a gentleman should never ask a lady her age.

So I think this year I’ll still happily tell you my age, that is if I can figure it out, and if you’re rude enough to ask. But enquire again in a couple of years and you’ll probably either get a lie, or a bit of a Mexican Stand-off.