My secret fantasy

I still kinda wish it would happen...

So I look at the thing and wonder: what made me bring that on holiday? What was I thinking? It’s not a 5000 piece jigsaw or a duffel coat. It’s my make-up bag, normally akin to food and water to me; i.e., essential for life. Wrangle the thing off me and God knows what would happen.

One time when I was travelling to Glasgow from our then-home in rural Lanarkshire to meet a friend for a day’s Christmas shopping. I’d left the house in a hurry, bare faced, and delved into my bag on the train for my make-up.

IT WASN’T THERE.

It was as shocking as one of those dreams where you step onto a stage to accept an award for something or other and people are clapping and cheering and you look down to see that you are completely naked from the waist down.

Not a scrap of make-up!!

I considered pulling the emergency cord (or smashing the little glass panel or whatever it is you do on trains), but decided ScotRail staff might take a dim view. Instead, I hurtled off at Glasgow Central station and rushed straight to Superdrug, keeping my head down until I’d bought ‘the basics’ and nipped back to the station loo in which to apply them.

For a day’s shopping with my dearest pal Cathy, who I’d known since we worked on Jackie mag together. As if she’d have reeled in horror if I’d been bare faced! But it’s probably my diet of teen magazines that made me fall in love with make-up in the first place.

Until I was fourteen, we’d lived in a teeny hamlet in West Yorkshire, where there was virtually zero of getting my paws on any of that glorious Boots 17 bounty that I yearned for. But then we moved to Irvine, a new town on the West Coast of Scotland, where I lived with my dad for a few months. It was strange and confusing time. People laughed at my Yorkshire accent, which I studiously erased within a fortnight. But - on the plus side - there was a Boots in the middle of town. A proper Boots with makeup counters! Heaven.

My poor baffled dad let me choose a gloopy lipgloss in a brick-like shade and an eyeshadow duo. High glamour ensued! Except, we had my problematic skin to deal with.

Dad bought me some kind of epidermis stripping toner which caused my skin to desiccate alarmingly, then fall off in a blizzard of flakes. ‘Seems like it’s either the drying out thing or the spots,’ Dad said sadly.

Oh my God, I thought: was that true? To be boil covered or witness my face flaking off, like a disintegrating croissant, if croissants had been invented then? (They had, of course, in France - just not in small town Scotland in 1979).

The boils/flaking option was as shocking to me as the time when, aged around thirteen, I’d found Mum in the garden and asked her: ‘How long do periods last for?’

‘Until you’re about fifty,’ she replied, and carried on casually pruning a rose.

OH. MY. GOD. Non-stop bleeding for thirty-seven years! It was shocking as finding out that Father Christmas wasn’t real. Or realising that the Osmonds’ private jet was NOT going to crash land, depositing the toothsome heartthrobs (unharmed, naturally) in a field near our village, ready to be ‘rescued’ by me and brought home for tea. Since I’d been capable of having any feelings at all, this had been my sole enduing fantasy.*

‘Thank goodness Fiona was here to rescue us!’

With crushing realisations such as these, no wonder the lot of the 70s teenager was a tough one. Okay, there was some good stuff, namely: Top of the Pops, Cinzano in the parental drinks cabinet and the invention of the Soda Stream. But these were also the days when it was considered absolutely okay to insult a neuroses-ridden teenage girl to her face.

Witness:

‘Oi! Concorde!’ - my wisecracking classmates, the entire 1970s

‘Tu manges le trottoir!’ (‘You eat the pavement!’) - yelled at me by a stranger on the Ist Oakworth Guides’ camping trip to Brittany, 1977

‘Your arse is like two footballs!’ - shouted at me by man on scaffolding, Dundee, 1983

At least people talk about sensitive matters these days. When I was a teen, no one talked openly and virtually everything was taboo. Never mind sex or your menstrual cycle, or even illness (‘cancer’ was a word to be mouthed silently). The developing body, with its hairy sproutings and asymmetrical protrusions was a minefield to be discussed with no one. That’s why teenage magazines, with their sympathetic agony aunts, were invaluable.

Me, aged 13, composing a song about that terrible period revelation

It was from these magazines that I learned that a boy wouldn’t ‘explode’ or ‘die’ if you wouldn’t let him ‘do it with you.’ Eventually I also learned that a period wasn’t some non-stop horror show stretching on and ON until you were as old as Ena Sharples with not a droplet of blood left in your body. From then on, life got a little bit better - especially as make-up had arrived! And how useful it was.

You could buy a flavoured roll-on lip gloss (chocolate, cherry, strawberry etc) and sidle up to a boy at disco and ask if he’d like to ‘taste’ it. What a ploy!

Following your terrible haircut your best friend might suggest, ‘It’s just one of those haircuts that needs a lot of make-up.’ We truly believed that slapping on an extra tonne of Max Factor would somehow ‘balance out’ a tragic cut.

Then there was the social aspect. ‘Getting ready’ in a friend’s bedroom was as much fun as the actual night out - often more, frankly. The aim back then was to look sophisticated (ha!) while now I try to look less corpse-like, less like someone who’s spent many months clattering at the keyboard, writing a book.

80s red lip! Having possibly enjoyed a shandy or two, with my pal Chris

That’s what make-up is to me now - hopefully bringing some life to the face. Like when you water a pot plant and it perks up instantly. Which is why, perhaps, it feels obsolete on this Portuguese beach holiday. I feel perked up anyway - and it’s blissfully hot. The concept of makeup sitting on skin feels as appealing as smothering it in lard.

But maybe I don’t completely regret bringing my full kit. What if, say, little Jimmy Osmond happens to be in town? Then I’ll be grabbing that roll-on cherry lipgloss and puckering right up!

I guess my make-up bag’s a bit like that bottle of chilled wine in the fridge. I might not feel like diving into it. But it’s nice to know it’s there.

How d’you feel about make-up right now? Is it a nuisance? A pleasure? Essential to life? Drop me a note in the comments!

Love,

Fiona x

*And it remains so to this day

.