Downsides

One thing I've learnt at my advanced age is that there's always a downside to everything. Always. No matter how wonderful something seems to be, sooner or later the shine will wear off. Assuming that from the start will save a lot of bitter disappointment, or at least keep you prepared for it.

When you're young, you dream of the perfect house, the perfect neighbourhood, the perfect job, the perfect partner, the perfect life. None of them exist but you're quite sure you can achieve them if you just go about it the right way.

It's only after many decades of experience, many decades of being constantly tripped up by reality, that you realise perfection is unobtainable. If you can achieve about 75 per cent of your ambitions, you're doing well.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean you should be a grim-faced pessimist always putting a dampener on everything. The trick is to be aware of the potential downside, and be ready for it, while enjoying the upside to the full while you're lucky enough to have been given it. Be as optimistic as you like, but without kidding yourself about the realities of life.

At my age I know a thing or two. However happy a marriage, there are always violent rows and disagreements from time to time. However splendid a house, it still has a leaking roof and dodgy plumbing. However satisfying a job, you still have to work with idlers and bunglers. However desirable a neighbourhood, there are still derelict houses and rowdy teenagers.

So I no longer see life through the rose-tinted spectacles I often wore as a child, but that means I'm also less prone to the constant cycle of high hopes and tearful disappointments I used to experience. I see life as it is, not as I imagine it to be. Or so I kid myself.

Coffee nirvana

When did coffee shops become so amazingly popular? So popular that right across the world, even in remote villages and on modest ferries you can get a first-rate cup of coffee.

Their earlier incarnation, the coffee bars of the nineteen fifties and sixties, were fashionable for a while but then lost their appeal, until eventually they were seen as a quaint relic of the past, frequented only by the likes of sad loners, tourists and cheating husbands. I can't remember ever going to one myself.

In those days of course few people had even tasted a top-notch coffee. Most of us were used to the insipid taste of instant coffee out of a jar, consisting of mysterious brown particles, and knew nothing better.

Now there's a coffee shop on virtually every street and the number escalates by the day. The quest for the perfect coffee - the freshest, tastiest, healthiest, climate-friendliest cup of joe, made from the most ethically-sourced beans on the planet - has become a relentless obsession. I'm as keen on a good cup of coffee as anyone else,  but I can't help thinking the search for coffee nirvana has gone a bit too far.

It's now quite normal to drop into a coffee shop several times a week, and pay anything up to a tenner for a coffee and a pastry. Anyone who never enters a coffee shop or doesn't like coffee is seen as a bit strange.

I have to admit Jenny and I like coffee shops. We go for a coffee and a chat every week at Caffè Nero (I know, I know, tax avoidance etc, but we love their coffee). We'll have a coffee if we're meeting friends or sitting in an airport or just killing time. But I'm not a fanatic about the taste. A decent latté will do me fine. I hope the beans weren't harvested by downtrodden peasant farmers, but I'm not going to spend the morning investigating.

I'd rather amuse myself by trying to spot the cheating husbands.

(Thanks to Kylie for the idea)

Only human

Isn't it fun when someone who seemed to be so angelic, so saintly, so pure, turns out to have some unsuspected Achilles Heel that makes them more like a human being - and more like you and me?

It's so galling when a person comes on as the perfect mother or Ms Generosity or Mr Infinitely-Patient-And-Understanding, and you're all too aware of your own boundless faults and failings.

You want to be admiring and complimentary, but there's a part of you that's also irritated and niggled by this apparent perfection, this inhuman flawlessness that just seems too good to be true.

You're constantly on the lookout for the cracks in the facade, the chinks in the armour, the carefully hidden reality behind the public persona. And you're constantly frustrated that it always seems to be the real McCoy.

Then one day you just happen to discover that the perfect mother has slapped her child, or Ms Generosity walked straight past a homeless person, or Mr Infinitely Patient showered a sales assistant with abuse, and you're so relieved because they've turned out to be mere mortals after all and not some impossible, unassailable paragon of virtue. They're just like me! They have feet of clay! Woo hoo!

Even better of course if over and above the contradictory behaviour they let slip that they have some truly debilitating weakness that's constantly about to overwhelm them - they're a slave to alcohol or drugs, they can't stop shopping, they like to be whipped, they're neat freaks. And you think, thank God for that, they're as human as the rest of us, they have their inner demons and their embarrassing habits. They've finally fallen off the pedestal. They've come clean.

Looking one's best

"When she lives independently of Bill, she forgets how much time she has to spend pretending to be better or prettier or nicer than she really is. She had waxed her legs, shaved her armpits, tweezered her face, and is now so stiff with foundation, powder, blusher and lipstick she feels that if she smiles too much half her face may fall off. Polly, whose normal appearance is that of a small woman who has had an unfortunate encounter with a tornado, has even had her hair done, and is also wearing the kind of reinforced underpants that women who have had babies tend to resort to." (Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds)

Of course if you ask a man, he'll say he's quite happy with his partner as she is, and actually it's other women she's trying to impress, not him. To which the woman will reply that he may say that but he thinks differently. In reality he wants her to be slimmer and sexier than all the other women he meets and he'll go off her pretty fast if she isn't.

I think there are both types of men, some more accepting of women as they really are than others. Hopefully I fall into the first camp and I don't expect women to go to those ridiculous lengths to fit some artificial glossy stereotype.

Mind you, it works the other way round as well. Some women don't mind men in the raw, men who make no effort at all to be what women want them to be. But other women recoil from such selfishness and want their guy to be attractive, emotionally sensitive, solvent, domesticated, sociable and generous. They can be equally critical of men who don't meet their exacting high standards.

If that means expecting men to be civilised and considerate and act like mature human beings, fair enough. If it means expecting them to be supermen who'll rescue them from every disaster and cater for their every need, that's asking the impossible. Nobody's that perfect.

Pretty ain't enough

So many men are naturally highly sexed, you'd think women wouldn't need to go to such lengths to make themselves look sexy. Yet men still demand a perfect female body to make love to. They want to have their cake and eat it.

It's not enough for the woman to be female, or pretty, or likeable, or just willing. If she doesn't conform to his mental image of sultry sexiness, she's somehow spoiling his pleasure.

So she has to spend her time primping and preening, depilating and dieting, slapping on cosmetics and enduring plastic surgery, so her man can feel suitably chuffed while he's getting his rocks off. This extreme male selfishness is euphemistically passed off as "looking after your man".

A woman I once knew said her ex-husband insisted on the full female regalia - padded bra, girdle, tight skirt, high heels and thick make-up - or he would dismiss her as plain and unfeminine. She always felt like a deranged drag queen. Needless to say, the marriage didn't last very long.

If women expected men to behave the same way, to doll themselves up like some theatrical dandy, men would simply laugh and take themselves off. But they reserve the right to impose laborious and arbitrary beauty regimes on women.

Unfortunately the media happily collude in this oppressive behaviour and give women relentless advice on how to turn themselves into male fantasies, complete with doctored photos of impossibly perfect women for them to aspire to.

The utter madness of this sexual straitjacket only becomes clear when some unlucky woman who's opted for plastic surgery once too often dies on the operating table and goes to an early grave - all in the name of giving her man an extra bedtime thrill.

PS: There have been several stories recently about women who sought permanent hair removal by laser, only to have their skin irreversibly disfigured by over-powerful lasers.

PPS: Virtually all the comments have disagreed with me - the pressure for women to be physically perfect comes not from men but from their own self-criticism, from other women and from advertising that plays on women's insecurities. How wrong can one be!