45. The First Time 2.0

A man offered me his seat on the Tube. An incident that has been debated on Vanessa, Loose Women, Times Radio, and LBC's Nick Ferrari. NOW FREE with bonus content

It would have been my mother’s 84^th birthday. May 29^th. I thought about her as I clattered down the corkscrew stairs of Holland Park Underground Station, past the prissy sign warning travellers not to attempt the stairs as there were 93 of them instead of encouraging people to use them as I would if I was in charge around here.

On the platform, in the soupy tunnel I took out my iPhone to play my little game, which is to do the Wordle before the next train arrives, which – thanks to the Central Line’s rapid peristalsis – is usually only a couple of minutes.

Mission accomplished, I got into a standing room only carriage. My mother died in 2021, aged 79. It was her time. But now she’s away – that tender Irish way of saying someone has died – I still miss her every day. I reminded myself of the vow I made to self: I’d pack every minute of my remaining portion with action and incident as she couldn’t – in short, I’d live my Best Life.

I was leaning against the glass partition, reading X on my phone, when I heard the voice. It was polite, asking someone if they could give them their seat. I continued reading my phone as it couldn’t possibly be me in my denim skirt and sneakers, sending ideas to my producer. Then the voice came again, same question.

“Excuse me, do you want to sit down?” I looked up and my eyes locked with a man to my right, in the Schuss position over the blue-patterned plush. He was hovering, uncertain as to whether to plant his rear back down, and gesturing to his seat - and looking back at me.

Instead of thanking him and moving down the carriage to take the seat, like a normal person, I shook my head in confused horror, and muttered my thank you but no, I was fine - but in truth I was shook. Shookest.

There was no way this kind man could have thought I was pregnant, a mutilée de guerre as on the Paris Metro, or disabled (I think). There was only one construction I could place on his offer.

He thought I was old. Not someone who plays tennis three times a week. Who weight-trains. Who walks everywhere. Always takes the stairs. Who thinks that – or used to think – that she didn’t look her chronological age yet (I was born in September 1965) and indeed who’d been told not so long ago that my “biological age” was only 35. I was at this German white-coat establishment (for Tatler, I think), a hybrid of hospital and spa, where punters shell out thousands of pounds for a concentration camp diet of hard tack and watery broth, and have biomedical assessments and scans to distract from the hunger. I was deeply chuffed about this until the comedian and writer Ruby Wax, who was on her “wellness journey” there too, revealed that she’d been told she was only 35 too. Ruby was born in 1953.

I’ve stopped telling people about my first time (someone offered me their seat on the Underground) because it has not met with the response I’d hoped for, ie gasps of disbelief, protestations that I’m the last person who looks like they need a seat on a hot Tube, or who can’t stand for seven whole minutes until Tottenham Court Road.

“Hahahahaha!” went my husband, who is in his early seventies. His mood was further improved when we were buying tickets to visit the Ulster Folk Museum last weekend. He was examining the list of prices outside this unmissable attraction (Adults £12.50, Child £7.80, Senior £9.75, Family of 3, £26.50, Family of 4, £30.75, Family of 5, £36.50). He enquired how old you had to be to be eligible for the senior discount.

“Sixty,” the woman at the ticket desk said. “Well, TWO seniors then please,” Ivo said, almost unable to contain his joy, and then watched as the woman glanced at me, issued the tickets and handed them over without demur.

“See,” he said, handing me mine. “Didn’t bat an eyelid. She didn’t ask to see your passport or proof of age or anything,” he continued, chuckling with satisfaction.

Any last faint hopes of being more stunna than Stannah died that day, especially as I have revealed all of this in the Spectator.

There’s no getting round it. “When you’re sixty,” as Mariella Frostrup told me, “you can’t spin it anymore.”

In the absence of my mother, the only person who could have spun it for me at this point, I applied to the only other maternal figure in my life. Elizabeth is a wonderful Irish woman in her eighties who gives me my fortnightly Vitamin injections including a shot of something that’s banned in the US called Gerovital.

“Do I really look like I can’t stand up for very long?” I asked, as I lay on the bed face down. “Do I, Elizabeth?” I mumbled into the white paper coverlet.

“No, he gave you his seat because you’re a lady,” Elizabeth said. “So don’t you be taking that to heart, now.”

She swabbed me with a wipe and stung my buttock with the needle.

PS I know how this will sound but I was leaving a summer party in flip flops on Thursday wearing a tight Cos long pale blue dress on backwards as if I put in on the right way round my bosom forms a massif continental shelf. It was a perfect luminous night and I’d had several glasses of delicious Chablis (THANK YOU Molly and William) and a car slowed down. The windows were down. Two burly (hunky?) men in the front seat, arms hanging out to catch the breeze. I presumed they were going to ask for directions. “Can I have your number?” the man called to me. I carried on flip-flopping down Addison Avenue, but Reader I can tell you I was grinning. He repeated his request. “I’m married!” I called back, and remembering the man on the Tube. “And old!”

The car drove off into the violet June night.

I’m left with the question. Do I present as a lady, an old lady, or a lady of the night? It’s a rhetorical one. I’m not sure it matters any more.

PPS When the Times kindly picked up this piece, my phone exploded and I was asked to do Loose Women…Vanessa…Times Radio and so on but en route the US I did Breakfast with Nick Ferrari. I keep meeting people who say, “I remember when someone offered me their seat I was outraged!” and “yes the first time is tough isn’t it". I thought I could accept anno domini with grace but a small part of me still thought I’d been offered a seat because, like Elizabeth said, a nice young man wanted to treat me like A LOIDY.

Well. On the way back from Wimbledon, I was on the District Line service to Edgware Road, on cloud nine after Fery beat Dimitov, clutching my wedge espadrilles in one hand and in the other, my little bag containing all the merch from the Royal Box including programme, photograph of the day, which had Roger Federer in the FROW, me three rows back behind David Harewood (row two) and Billie Jean King (row three) and just as I was thinking, a Brit could win Wimbledon! And England could win the World Cup! And it happened.

Again. This time it was a young Asian WOMAN offering her seat and reader I was so footsore and humbled by my faux-pas with the young man on the Central Line that this first time that I accepted it. One swallow doesn’t make a summer and all that but two very much does.

“It happened again,” I told Ivo. “But this time, I can’t even PRETEND this was gallantry, as this time it was a woman.”

I had never seen Ivo look so happy.

“It must be because in China and Japan they venerate their elders,” I went on.

He was very satisfied by the turn of events as it seemed to prove that I have caught up with him (he is 73!) and now we are both in the winter of our lives though I remain 13 years younger.

This morning I saw Elizabeth, 81, however for my Gerovital (the clue is in the name) and she, again, dug me out of the hole of self pity. “Don’t be silly now,” she said. “She’d seen you on television. She was only being polite! It wasn’t because you’re old, it was because she recognised you, and she had some manners unlike most young people nowadays. Take a deep breath.” She jabbed my buttock.

“Elizabeth,” I said, “She was a Chinese tourist. She didn’t know me from her own grandmother.”

Even I have to accept defeat at this point.