I’m in London, in a gap between meetings, trying on jeans. I’ve decided that I’m going to become more my old self, given that, having consulted two renowned psychics, this is going to be MY YEAR. So I have to abandon the Paper, Denim & Cloth skinnies I purchased in 2003. I bought them when I started my job as a fashion editor on a daily newspaper and my second piece was how to buy the perfect pair of jeans. This pair was indeed perfect. They might have cost £175 in Selfridges, but look how long they’ve lasted! Now, though, they are living up to their name and are, indeed, paper thin, and the knees have crumbled. Which is why I am now in Primark on the shabby end of Oxford Street, which I guess is appropriate. I join a melee and find my pair. I hold them against me, as I never try on clothes: changing room mirrors are as bad for a woman’s sense of self as a powerful man. Size six, in a toothpick shape, and £13. I used to buy loaves of bread that cost more! But at least I’m now two sizes smaller than I was in 2003. One small victory, I suppose.
I’m feeling buoyant, as I have just left an appointment with a hearing consultant. I had a test, an examination and then I sat before the doctor as he told me the results. ‘You have severe hearing loss,’ he said. ‘It probably happened when you were ten or 11 as those tiny microphone cells have been destroyed. Because you are not using your ears, your hearing has got worse. I have no idea how you have been able to function, let alone cope. It must have been exhausting.’
I welled up. At last, someone was being nice to me. Someone understood. ‘Everyone is so rude to me because I can’t hear,’ I told him. ‘Even my boyfriend would tut and roll his eyes.’
‘That’s horrible,’ the doctor said.
‘Yes, he is,’ I replied.
I am to have a hearing aid made for each ear, which I pick up in two weeks’ time. Each tiny, transparent device will be able to tell if I am in a cinema, theatre, at an awards ceremony (nah; all my peers hate me), on a dinner date (fat chance!) or next to a busy road. In Switzerland on a work assignment a few weeks ago, I had thought the village was car free, as that’s what it said in the brochure. I stepped out of the hotel, straight into the road. A buggy, going really fast, missed me by millimetres.
I am to have dinner tonight with my best friend Sue Needleman, who is treating me to The Ivy Soho Brasserie on Broadwick Street. Just walking along that road brings back so many memories: I’d worked, from 1981 until nearly the 1990s on the corner, at the National Magazine Company. At the time, I was lovesick for David, poor, anorexic, renting a bedsit with no cooking facilities. I was a virgin in more than one sense of the word: I’d never dyed my hair, or had a breast reduction, or a face-lift, or veneers on my teeth, soon to be ruined by four Cox apples a day, bought from the market at lunchtime on Berwick Street, to stave hunger pangs. I’d thought I had to be thinner to bag David. Turned out even being a toothpick wasn’t enough. But boy, looking back, how happy I should have been. I had youth, a future, potential.
So, given I realise I have to seize the day, stop wallowing, especially as my decade of torture is about to finish (I will be discharged from bankruptcy at the end of April, which means I can start over), I have done something else monumental. I’ve been along to the Urban Retreat atop Harrods and had a patch test. Shamefully, it has been so long since my last hair dye and lash tint that I’ve expired – in the beauty world at least – so need to be ‘re-inducted’. As I stood in reception, a therapist in a white coat dabbed behind my ear with a dot of black dye. She gave me a wink. ‘Welcome back, Liz,’ she said, giving my arm a squeeze. ‘We’ve missed you.’