Getting on with Ex

I am beginning to find myself really getting old.  I have got much fatter and much wrinklier this year - my 54th.  Wrinkles AND spots. That really is unfair.  I am trying new moisturisers - I've moved from Boot's Protect and Perfect, to Neal's Yard Frankincense Nourishing Cream, to Olay's Regenerist 3 which has apparently got special peptides in it. Nothing's working, and they all seem to curdle with any foundation I may try putting on top.  I don't suppose my diet of Cava, fags, riding  through the horizontal rain of Dartmoor, and getting divorced, are terribly helpful for my complexion, nor my belief
that it's good to get sunburnt because you go brown more quickly that way.

Nobody's commented on my demise in the looks department yet, except the children who have cheerfully advised me that I am beginning to look like Granny.

Meanwhile Ex is, annoyingly, looking better every day!  He appears to be keeping to the diet and regime prescribed by his personal trainer, and fifty year old men, with their greying temples, do tend to look better than fifty year old women, I suppose.

I am so grown up I invited him to the dinner party for our friends the other day, once I had checked that Esteemed Partner was happy about the idea.  It was payback for him driving Revered Son home for me, without query or moaning.  Ex is just the best company, and I was really pleased that he joined us.  He helped make the evening go with a real swing, no matter how surprised our friends were to see him at the table!

The children and I are utterly intrigued and full of conjecture about what the next lady he introduces us all to will be like. I think he might prove happier with a straightforward outdoorsey-type who camps, rather than the ruthless and manipulative film-star lookalikes he has favoured of late.  His oldest and most loyal friends are all very grounded people.  Would you believe  that  during his public speaking gigs, when he goes on about how he  'did it all for his family', women send him napkins with "I want to have your babies" written in lipstick on them!  Whatever he does,  I think the children and I are going to have to wait a while before our curiosity is satisfied!