HOW TO…LIE ABOUT YOUR AGE
First things first – we all lie about our age. In fact, the next time someone asks you how old you are, there’s a 99.73% chance you’ll tell a fib – because unless it’s your birthday, you’ll probably round it down a few months.
TEXT ALAN NEEDHAM | ILLUSTRATIONS LADISLAV KOSA
In fact, we spend colossal amounts of our lives denying the most basic fact of our existence, and we all go through certain phases of age-doctoring as we get older. Until our early teens, we know our exact age to the week, and we aren’t shy about coming forward with it. Then there’s a phase from about 13 to 16 when we add a couple of years on for the usual reasons – mainly so we can get served in pubs, buy cigarettes, and con people we fancy that we’re more mature than is in fact the case.
Stage Three is the most awkward of the lot: when we add on and trim off years according to the situation at hand. When I was 17, for example, my age could change several times over the course of a single night: when I got on the bus, I’d be 15 (so I could pay the child fare), then I’d magically age three years to get into the pub, slip back another three years for the bus home, and then right myself when I got home.
Stage Four (from 21 to 35-ish), is a lot simpler; we just don’t bother because we don’t need to. Stage Five, on the other hand, is the really dangerous one – when we start rounding down for myriad reasons, of which more later. Suddenly, at Stage Six, we revert to our former selves and wear our age as a badge of pride again, only replacing: “Don’t treat me like a baby when I’m five and three-quarters!” with: “I’m 79, you know.”
Great moments in age-altering history
Lying about one’s age is often seen as the preserve of vain and terrified women. Not so. There are some pretty serious examples of age-doctoring rattling about the history books. Take the beginning of World War I, when thousands of kids from all over Europe lied about their age so they could fight in trenches (the most famous of which being Steptoe Senior – or so he claimed in every other episode). On a lighter note, Ludwig van Beethoven’s father (the most competitive dad ever – he regularly used to come home from the pub and drag his son out of bed to make him practise until morning) put it about during early concerts that his lad was seven years old instead of the actual nine, to make him look even more prodigious. Obviously if everyone realised how long in the tooth the child really was, they wouldn’t have bothered listening.
But the vainest act of age-tampering in history may belong to that delicate flower, erm, Joseph Stalin, who is suspected of having lopped a year off his age just after he came to power. The reason? He wanted a huge nationwide party for his 50th birthday, but his rule wasn’t absolute enough when the actual date rolled around.
It goes without saying that for the most serious examples, you have to go hunting in the ranks of the entertainment industry, where everyone behaves as if they have a sell-by date stamped on their forehead, which makes it hard to pick out a champion. Take crisp bag-faced celebrity matriarch Jackie Stallone; she claimed on Celebrity Big Brother that she was a mere 71. All well and good, but that meant that she would have to have been 12 when she dropped Sly. Comedienne Gracie Allen claimed five different birth years throughout her life, to the point where even husband George Burns didn’t know her real age. Al Lewis – Grandpa Munster himself – did it in reverse: it was only when he died that it turned out he’d added a whopping 13 years to his age, for reasons unknown.
So what’s our excuse?
Maybe we’re being too harsh on the estimated one in three actors who lie their celebrity behinds off. After all, in a business where the clock is always ticking and your job prospects depend on the pigeonhole you’ve been put in, sometimes you have to fib to get on. If it wasn’t for some crafty alterations to his birth certificate, you might never have heard of Laurence Fishburne (who added three years to his age to land a part in Apocalypse Now). Lucille Ball and Dezi Arnaz (who bumped up and knocked down their respective ages by three years each in order to avoid a cradle-snatching outcry), while James Blunt, depending on who you talk to, took anything between three and six years off his age in order to land a record deal.
So why does the average person do it? There are loads of reasons, really. You have your standard vanity-related ones – self-delusion, fear of not being “down with the kids” – worries about job security, and feeling too ancient attract a new mate. But the chief cause is that getting older is viewed as a crippling illness in a Western society that values youth and virility above everything else. Most people are comfortable with their age, but they’re worried other people might not be quite so relaxed about it.
“Men and women have always lied about their age,” says Sarah Hedley, editor of saucy ladies mag Scarlet. “It was seen as acceptable for women to do this, but that changed when Geri Halliwell came along and the media were in uproar over how old she really was. The message was: ‘It’s not cool to lie about your age.’”
HOW TO DO IT:
Pick a new birthdate and stick to it. This doesn’t just mean plucking a year out of the air – you really have to do your homework. Find out what was number one on the week you were (re)born, who won the FA Cup that year, what historical events happened while your mother was pregnant, and all that. But it doesn’t end there – to really carry it off, you’ll have to totally revise the history books so you can cross-reference every modern cultural artefact against your new age. For example: “Cor, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go – they always played this at my… [pause, think] junior school disco.”
Be totally realistic when you select said new birth date. “Age is less relevant in a time where science can help you cheat the years. People can now look the age they feel, and fool the rest of the world into believing they’re younger than they are,” says Sarah. “This in turn makes society treat the person as though they’re younger, so a positive cycle is formed. And if we can maintain the health of a 25-year-old, we may as well be 25.” The flip side of this is if you’re pretending that you’re 35 when you’re actually 42 – and a rough-looking 42 at that – people are going to see a very unhealthy 35-year-old and assume you’re going to look even older when you reach your real age, defeating the object entirely.
Remove all traces of your original birth year. In other words, don’t claim to be under 30 when your e-mail address is dave1974@hotmail.com. And the same goes the same for your password on the office PC, your PIN number, and anything else that might betray you.
Try not to be Caucasian. They tend to age more quickly than everyone else, due to the fact that lighter skin tones, and the harsher climate they usually live in, bring on the wrinkles like nobody’s business. And they’re not from an Asian culture that generally venerates age and wisdom.
Be prepared to accept serious consequences if you get caught out. Because if you can’t be honest about your age, what can you be trusted on? “I dated a man who lied about his age – ridiculously, by two years, pretending to be 30,” says Sarah. “It made me pity him, which was an absolute passion-killer. As for believing whatever else he told me, I don’t think I ever really did again.”
As you can see, it involves a lot of hard work that carries a high level of risk but no guarantee of a pay-off in the end. Maybe, at a time when older people are not only allowed to carry on like twentysomethings, but are actively encouraged to do so, we’re finally realising that your date of birth really is just a number. And maybe the next time we decide to tamper with our age, we should consider going upwards. After all, as American column-ist Danielle Crittenden has said: “I look fine for a 45-yearold. I’m a tired 40-year-old. I’m a haggard 35-year-old. But I’m an astonishing 50-year-old.”
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