How to tell you have an anti-aging attitude: 1. You subtract a couple of years off your age when asked. 2. You fork out 50 quid regularly for ‘anti-gravity serum’. 3. You assume BY0B on a party invite means Bring Your Own Botox. If you’re using dodgy math, weird science or plastic surgery to abate the onset of age, you’re trapped in the quicksands of counterfeit youth. Before you go under, take a bite from the basket of Idunn, the Norse Goddess of Eternal Youth.
Idunn was very popular with the other goddesses as she was the apple keeper – and for the Vikings, an apple a day kept the years away. She was pretty proud of her pommes and the power they held; she herself looked preternaturally youthful from chomping her way down to a few cores daily. One day a trickster said he had found an apple tree with even more effective fruit… he lured her into the woods where an evil giant, disguised as an eagle, swooped down, grabbed Idunn and her apple-basket, and spirited her away to his far-off mountain lair. This kidnapping meant no-one looked like a kid anymore. The trick had backfired: although Idunn was eventually recaptured (disguised as a nut, but that’s another story), her age-defying apples were gone for good.
Unlike Idunn and her clan, you have to accept age, apples or no apples. Whether you are in the twilight of your twenties, thrashing through your thirties, fighting 40 or facing fifty, you are getting older. Face it, don’t fear it. And don’t spend so much on face cream… don’t you honestly think if an ‘anti-gravity serum’ had been discovered, NASA would have patented it by now? You’ve been ageing since you were born – deny this and you deny your life force.
Mod Idunn – Yoko Ono: avant-garde filmmaker, composer and conceptual artist, now in her seventies. Yoko's career in the art underground was well-established before she met and married Beatle John Lennon, and they both became radically involved in the peace movement. His tragic murder made her an iconic widow but she continues to work as an artist, recording songs, and speaking out against racism and sexism.
