Late Blooming Lives

I heard a heart-warming story the other day from a friend of my daughter. Her mother-in-law, Diana is 90 years old and she plays Bridge in a league. In a recent competition she came third out of two hundred players. As someone new to this devilishly difficult and challenging card game, I find that level of skill and mental acuity absolutely astonishing. I console myself with the thought that I have only been playing Bridge for a year whilst Diana has been playing it for her entire adult life.

Does this make me want to throw in the towel and accept that, at 76 years of age, I have started to learn Bridge far too late to be top-notch like Diana? Not at all. In fact it makes me even more determined to carry on, because who knows how good I might be at 90 if I put the work in?

My motivation to continue stems from my belief that older brains are perfectly capable of learning new stuff and acquiring new skills if we want them to. I also believe that when we are older, there is a difference between continuing to develop something you have always been good at and learning something new from scratch. However, sometimes the two intersect in the most satisfying way. Take, for example, my decision aged 65 to start a whole new business in an industry about which I knew absolutely nothing.

My story is invariably told in the press as one of late blooming entrepreneurialism. It is unusual (although becoming more common) for someone semi-retired and in their mid-sixties to found a new enterprise, and yet I see Look Fabulous Forever as the culmination of all the knowledge, skills and experience I have acquired during my working life, which only started properly when I was 38. I already knew all about turnover, margins, cashflow and overheads and the myriad other things that mean business success or failure. I also knew that I was a good salesperson who had long experience of making presentations to camera.

I also knew what I didn’t know. Things like the technical aspects of creating the right range of makeup and how to use Youtube and Facebook to attract attention and customers. So, yes, I was on a very steep learning curve at the start of LFF eleven years ago, but I sought out people who could teach me all that I needed to know. For instance, I trained as a makeup artist with a class full of twenty-somethings, and worked with a formulator, a website creator and a product designer. I also remained confident that if the business was successful, I would eventually be able to create a team of people whose job it would be to do all the things that I was personally responsible for in the early days.

The older I get the more passionate I have become about acquiring new knowledge and skills. I started exercising for the very first time ever at 69, I have discovered a very well hidden talent for drawing, am continually exploring watercolour painting and now, my latest passion is Bridge. There have been a couple of failures in the form of Ballroom and Latin dancing which I only managed for two terms (why? Long story and a combination of factors), and learning Italian which I quickly decided was too complicated and muddling as I have been learning French from the age of seven.

Which brings me to some of the other beliefs, blocks and barriers that might get in the way of late blooming:

1. Life Patterns. For the most part, we Boomers are still living life patterns familiar to our parents. Childhood, education, marriage and mortgage, work (definitely for a man, less so for a woman) followed by retirement which is a period of rest and leisure as a reward for your efforts. For many people this is already changing with extended working lives, and for our grandchildren it is likely to be a completely different pattern with periods of work interspersed with periods of reeducation and training, maybe for the whole of their long lives.

2. Time and energy. We may have more time to keep learning when we are older, but do we have the energy? Part of the reward in retirement is to kick back and take time to smell the roses or the coffee. The other temptation is to fill your life with busyness, which may tire you out, but does it fully satisfy you? When I reflect back at the end of each year I easily forget all the things I have done in my busy life, but I remember the challenges to my development, and they are the things which matter to me the most.

3. It’s never too late. Mozart composing the Minuet in G for the keyboard at the age of 5 or Tiger Woods winning his first 10 years-and-under golf tournament at 3. There’s something so cute and beguiling about stories of tiny little kids effortlessly doing things that usually take adults years to master. But remember that we know their names because they are so rare and exceptional. And we forget late bloomers like Mary Wesley who published her first novel at the age of 71, Wendy Cope who became a poet at 40 and Julia Child who wrote her first cookery book at 50.

4. Losing Your Marbles. Possibly my greatest fear is to lose the capacity to remember and therefore to learn new things. But how likely is it? In fact it is surprisingly unlikely. For people aged between 65 and 69, around 2 in every 100 people have dementia. That’s just 2%. The risk then starts to increase with age, roughly doubling every 5 years, so at my age of 77 the risk is nearer to 10% and for those aged 90 or more it’s up to 33% which means that two-thirds haven’t developed dementia and are unlikely to do so!  And yet the perception is that some form of mental deficit is inevitable, normal and very likely to affect you if you live a very long life. The statistics tell a very different story.

5. What’s the point? I love the fact that outside of the business there is absolutely no purpose to the knowledge that I set myself to acquire every year. Society tends to view education as instrumental. Much scorn is poured on ‘useless degrees’ taught in universities because they don’t equip the student with a specific qualification for the workplace. I have two sons-in-law, one studied Geography at university and the other Spanish and French. Both have very successful careers in finance and the fluent Spanish and French speaker has clients overseas. 

And finally, for inspiration, I thought I’d tell you about Julie Proctor who is our 60 year old LFF Customer Services Manager. During lockdown she taught herself to paint in oils for the first time, eventually producing some seriously impressive artworks. This has opened up a whole new world for Julie which, on the 1st April will culminate in her opening a new artist’s studio in Abbey Mills in Wimbledon. 

Here is Julie's Late Blooming Story:

“I have always been creative but never tried painting or drawing, except for face painting which I love.  When lockdown hit, I had a set of oil paints which was given to me years ago. I then started to watch Youtube tutorials on how to paint portraits and realised how much I loved it and also thought “I'm not bad at this”. The more I painted, the better I became. 

I then started to think about what to paint. My phone was full of the photos of faces I had created using face paints, so I started there. Clown faces were my favourite. For more inspiration I googled 'clown face paints' and up popped this weird and wonderful story of clowns registering their faces and costumes on eggs for nearly 100 years. No two clowns can ever look the same. These eggs are numbered, signed by the artist and are then displayed in the Clown Egg Museum in East London. I contacted Clowns International to ask permission to represent the eggs as paintings on canvas. As a result they offered me the job as the official Clown Egg Artist. Of which there can only ever be one at a time - this is clown law! 

A selection of my clown eggs

I work from Monday to Thursday for LFF, so I paint from Friday to Sunday and some evenings, however it is on my mind 24/7. I go to sleep and wake every day bursting with new ideas and I watch at least one tutorial every day. What I love is taking an idea, creating it in oil paint and then sharing it. In the past five years I have had lots of recognition for my artworks and have sold many paintings. I also exhibit regularly and currently have nine paintings on display (see below) in an art gallery in Putney until the end of March https://www.instagram.com/the_gallery_art_studio/?igsh=Y3lpNzNodnlxNTQ3&utm_source=qr#.

I have now come up with a new idea to support other artists like me who create from home, which can be quite lonely. Renting a studio space is expensive and a big commitment. I want to offer artists a space to work together and be inspired by each other, so from the 1st of April, I am setting up a gallery for artists and other creators. It will be a ‘pay as you go’ studio and gallery where artists can both work and sell what they create. It will be very flexible and the artist can book one day a week or more - whatever suits them best. I was inspired by Sky Art’s Portrait Artist of the Year where it is clear to see that people love to watch artists create. It’s never been done before but I am so excited to launch this and have already had lots of interest.”

Isn’t that brilliant? I’m already looking forward to popping into Julie’s gallery to see the artists at work and, who knows? Maybe one day I’ll pluck up the courage to join them in their artistic endeavour in order to create some masterpiece of my own. Perhaps I’ll call it ‘Artwork by Tricia, The Late Blooming Boomer.’

Tricia x

https://www.instagram.com/proctor_art/

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