With ageing, though, it’s not the beginnings of life, it’s the winding down of it. Unless, of course, you’re the marvellous, the wonderous, the barmy Mariah Carey. The 56-year-old is going for the Trump approach: Deny, deny, deny. She’s treating ageing like it’s a truculent toddler having a tantrum. “I don’t allow it — it just doesn’t happen,” she has declared in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK. “I don’t know time. I don’t know numbers. I do not acknowledge time,” she says. Jaypers, you’d love to be meeting her for lunch, wouldn’t you? “Mariah girl, I’m here waiting for ya, table just inside the door, I’m two cappuccinos in, you’re 45 minutes late.” Send. Mariah is typing... “I DON’T KNOW TIME. I DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE TIME.” “I’ll order you a toastie so.” To be fair, she’s wearing it well, but ‘tis fine for her, the apple-cheeked little multi-millionaire. Who knows what marvellous wonders she has at her disposal to ensure she never has to go through the trauma of finding that first grey pubic hair? Imagine the note she’d hit in the shower on that fateful day, ladies, am I right?! The rest of us women, living La La Land adjacent, wearing clothes devoid of thigh splits and corsets pushing our bosoms beyond the realms of physics and gravity, have no choice but toaccept time, and its passing as a very real thing. I was listening to Total Eclipse of the Heart the other day and a sob hitched in my throat at the part where Bonnie Tyler sings: Every now and then, I get a little bit tired Of listening to the sound of my tears (Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit nervous That the best of all the years have gone by (Turn around)’ Now there’s a songstress who understands the existential angst of finding yourself pondering handrails for the bath in Woodie’s of a Saturday afternoon. And I bet Mariah never found herself needing a swig of gin from the trauma of signing up for a tag rugby game. HER Outdoors Week is a national initiative by Sport Ireland that’s all about celebrating and encouraging more females to experience the benefits of outdoor physical activity. A worthy scheme, for sure, sign me up, baby, but they had one of those clickity clackety wheel things to put in your date of birth. This leads to this HER Indoors right here nearly having a nervous breakdown. Whiiiiiiiiiizzzzzzzzzzzzz! goes the wheel. It took about half an hour to track back to the 1970s. I wasn’t the better after it. By the time I’d registered, tag rugby felt ambitious. Perhaps there was some nice beach bone softening sessions I could sign up for instead, where us oldies could sag on some deckchairs witnessing our calcium deposits and viable eggs decline in real time. My children make me feel old too. I tried talking to them in modern parlance the other evening and they nearly expired from the embarrassment. “Dinner’s ready, and it’s fire, bros. I lowkey cooked — literally and slang-wise. No Fanum Tax, just vibes. I think I’m entering my chef era, no cap.” “Mom,” said the 13-year-old, in a very serious tone. “Don’t ever do that again.” Those jive turkeys. Another thing that makes me feel like a decrepit doppelganger has taken over my being is when the camera comes on unexpectedly in reverse when I’m going to take a photo on my phone. I literally yelped out loud the other day, like a kicked dog. There was this frowny, double-chinned, crazy-looking bitch on the screen, and it took me a couple of seconds to realise it was me. Mirrors, any reflective surface really, are not my friends. I’m horribly short-sighted, so I take my glasses (Mr Magoo goggles) off when I’m doing my make-up, and I think I’m blurry and beautiful, and then I put the glasses back and regret not wearing waterproof mascara as I wail and curse at the cruel passage of time. So you can kiss my wrinkly old ass, Mariah Carey. Because while us mere mortals may not have the luxury of sticking our dewy-skinned, button-nosed heads in the sands of time, like a deluded ostrich, we have wisdom, and experience, and granted, no oestrogen, but I’ll take ageing disgracefully over pretending I don’t know how a clock works any day.