Celebrity Witterings

Presenter and campaigner Katie Piper has told an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales that "ageing can be compared to a bereavement."

why would anyone say anything so daft? 

Piper's latest book, which is published on Friday, is titled Still Beautiful: On Age, Beauty and Owning Your Space.

oh, say no more! 

The 41-year-old said: "Women age out of the male gaze. I was ripped from the male gaze at 24. I didn't just become invisible. I became a target for people saying derogatory things."

Derogatory things like ‘You’re talking bollocks, love’ perhaps? 

Piper, who is also a presenter on the BBC programme Songs of Praise and ITV's Loose Women. said she had recently been asked if writers minded if they mentioned her age. "It was shocking, but not surprising. This was because I had been reminded at such a young age the currency and the power a woman holds when she is considered either beautiful or young, and now here I was going through the second phase of youth slipping away and feeling, once again, society's judgement and the label that they were going to put on to me."

It’s a familiar refrain. Because we are all getting older - some of us with dignity and acceptance, some of us...clearly not!

She said she felt positive about getting older. "I'm going to be 42 in October. I'm still incredibly young to many, and old and past it to some. You realise, 'I know who I am.' I have a strong sense of self and identity. This is the heyday. This is the time of my life. So I can only imagine what's on [for the] 50s and 60s and the decades beyond. I feel excited by that second chapter."

She said if she had to give one message to her younger self, it would be: "If you've ever felt less than... you've hated yourself or felt ashamed, it was never you. It was society, consumerism and capitalism. It was beneficial to someone, somewhere, to hold you down.

Oh, boy, capitalism is forever the big bogeyman in some people’s eyes, even as they earn a nice living from it, isn’t it?