Salma Hayek Has Turned 60. This Seems Unnecessarily Provocative.

Salma Hayek has celebrated her 60th birthday by going skinny-dipping and looking so magnificent that I’m beginning to suspect she has made a private arrangement with time.

Sixty!

I’ve looked carefully at the photographs, and I can’t see a single sign that gravity has ever been introduced to her. Everything is still exactly where it was originally issued. Her skin glows, her hair tumbles beautifully down her back, and even naked in the ocean she looks composed. If I went skinny-dipping, concerned people on the shore would immediately begin searching for the overturned kayak.

How does she look so good?

She says she doesn’t use Botox. Of course she doesn’t. Apparently, she meditates. I have tried meditating, but I spend the entire time thinking about whether I turned the oven off and mentally composing arguments with people who annoyed me in 1997. None of this has made me look like Salma Hayek.

She also credits restorative yoga, juices and generally taking care of herself. I occasionally take care of myself too. Last week I remembered to moisturise both legs. Admittedly, I did one in the morning and the other just before bed, but nobody said the legs had to be done together.

Obviously, Salma has excellent genes. She also has access to expensive skincare, personal trainers, stylists, flattering lighting and probably somebody whose entire job is to follow her around holding a bowl of berries. I don’t begrudge her any of it. If I had her money, I would employ a full-time professional to slap biscuits out of my hand and another one to gently lower me to the floor whenever an exercise involved getting down there.

But money alone doesn’t explain it. Plenty of rich people look as though they’ve been left overnight in a hot car. Salma is simply spectacular. She has curves, she hasn’t starved herself into the shape of a bookmark, and she seems genuinely comfortable in her own skin. That may be the most attractive thing of all.

There is also something rather marvellous about a woman turning 60 and celebrating by taking her clothes off instead of quietly disappearing behind a sensible cardigan. Women have spent generations being told that we become invisible as we age. Salma appears to have responded by swimming naked through the middle of the argument.

Good for her.

I don’t expect to look like Salma Hayek when I turn 60—mainly because that particular ship has already sailed, hit an iceberg and been converted into a floating casino. But I do like the idea of refusing to become apologetic about ageing.

Perhaps that is her real secret. Good genes, excellent skincare, restorative yoga, enormous wealth—and absolutely no intention of becoming smaller just because she’s getting older.

Although I still think there may be witchcraft involved.

Writing a Children’s Book Is Child’s Play. Apparently.

I have been writing children’s books, which sounds delightful. You imagine me sitting peacefully at a desk (or the dining room table; because the Squeeze claims the study), smiling fondly as a golden giraffe swallows a star or a sleek red fox paints the house like Picasso.

That is not what happens.

Writing the story is the easy part. You invent a giraffe called Horatio or a fox called Dionysus, give them a small behavioural problem, destroy part of a house and finish with a charming rhyme. Lovely. Then you begin the illustrations—and discover you have accidentally entered a long-term dispute over continuity.

On page one, Dionysus is a handsome red fox with white paws and a magnificent russet tail. By page six, he appears to have changed species, gained several kilos and undergone facial reconstruction. Grandma Sookey is no better. She arrives with big hair and makeup like a clown, but two pages later she has a different face, different clothes and possibly a different ethnic background. Nobody mentions it. Apparently, this family has experienced stranger things.

Then comes the text. At first, I thought it would be helpful to have the words placed neatly onto each illustration. That was before discovering the words were either too large, too small, in the wrong place or sitting directly across Grandma’s forehead. So now I want every picture without type. I’ll put the words in myself in Photoshop, where I can move them around until they behave—or until I lose the will to live.

There are also approximately nine hundred tiny decisions nobody warns you about. Is the fox bright red or russet? Are his paws white enough? Is the giraffe too yellow? Does Grandma look startled, terrified or as though she has just remembered she left the iron on? Is that the same chair from three pages ago? Why does the hallway now lead directly into the kitchen? And when did the house acquire a second staircase?

Children, of course, will notice every mistake. Adults might politely overlook a fox whose tail changes colour halfway through the book. A five-year-old will point at it immediately and demand an explanation. You cannot bluff a five-year-old. They are tiny continuity editors with no social filter.

Still, I’m enjoying it enormously. There is something wonderful about watching characters that have lived in your head finally appear on the page—even if they occasionally appear with the wrong face, an extra window and a grandmother nobody has seen before.

Soon I will have two beautifully illustrated children’s books: The Day My Giraffe Swallowed a Star and The Day My Fox Painted a Picasso. Then, I'll move on to the next one. A bunch of stories about a little kid and their outrageous pet!

Or I will have 147 pictures of unrelated foxes, six different grandmothers and a permanent twitch in my left eye.

Either way, something is getting published.

Can’t Type. Finals Football!

Oh I do love this time of year. Football season is coming to a close. I love a Grand Final. That minute at the start when everyone thinks they will win. The umpire stands in the centre; 100k people start screaming.  

I’ve been to 4 winning grand finals. 5 losing ones. I don’t think I’ll go again. Of course, I have to even it up; so I need another winning one!

I’ve Survived 29 Brain Operations, But a Password Reset May Finish Me Off

I have survived 29 brain operations. I have recovered from things that would cause most people to lie flat on the floor and refuse to participate in life ever again. Yet this week, I was nearly defeated by a password box.

Apparently, the password I have used successfully for months is suddenly wrong. It isn’t wrong. I know it isn’t wrong because I wrote it down after being told repeatedly that writing passwords down is dangerous. What is apparently less dangerous is allowing a website to lock me out of something I own while insisting that I prove I am not a robot by identifying seventeen microscopic traffic lights.

I requested a password reset. The website told me it had sent an email. It had not. I requested another. Still nothing. Five minutes later, both arrived together, but the first link had expired and the second apparently belonged to a different moment in the space-time continuum.

Then came the security code.

“Enter the six-digit code we sent to your phone.”

Fine. I left the website to check my messages. When I returned, the website had refreshed and wanted me to log in again. I logged in again. It sent another code. I left to find that one. When I came back, it refreshed again. This is not security. This is psychological warfare.

Modern life is full of tiny inconveniences that are supposedly making everything easier. Restaurants make us scan a QR code to read a menu, then the menu wants our email address, mobile number and date of birth before it will reveal the price of a chicken schnitzel. Car parks no longer accept coins. Banks no longer have branches. Businesses no longer have telephone numbers. If you do find one, a recorded voice says your call is important while leaving you on hold long enough to reconsider whether the matter—or indeed life itself—is worth pursuing.

Nothing simply works anymore. Everything needs an account, an app, an update, a verification code and permission to track your location. I recently attempted to perform one small task online and ended up with twelve browser tabs open, three confirmation emails and no memory of what I had originally intended to do.

And heaven help you if you click “Forgot password.” The website will demand a new password containing a capital letter, a lowercase letter, a number, a symbol, an ancient rune and the blood type of your first pet. You carefully create one, only to be told that your new password cannot be the same as an old password.

Which means it knew the old password all along.

I suspect we are no longer angry because life is particularly terrible. We are angry because we spend every day being pecked to death by digital ducks. One minor annoyance would be manageable. Fifty of them before lunch turns a reasonable adult into someone screaming, “I AM NOT A ROBOT!” at a photograph of a pedestrian crossing.

Technology was supposed to give us more leisure time. Instead, we now spend that leisure time updating technology, charging technology, searching for technology and asking technology why it can’t connect to the other technology sitting three centimetres away.

I’m not against progress. I would just like progress to remember the original arrangement: it was meant to work for us.

Because after everything I have survived, I refuse to be taken out by a little red message saying, “Something went wrong. Please try again later.”

Something did go wrong.

We invented the internet.

I Now Require All Purchases to Pass an Intelligence Test

I have finally found a practical use for artificial intelligence. I don’t need it to compose a symphony, diagnose the economy or create a lifelike video of Donald Trump riding a dolphin. I need it to stop me buying rubbish from Facebook.

This has become necessary because the internet has apparently identified me as a woman with skin, joints, teeth, hair and several functioning insecurities. Every time I open Facebook, I am offered something miraculous. A cream that removes age spots in fourteen days. A strip that whitens teeth without damaging them. An oil that repairs joints, erases wrinkles, improves circulation and possibly fixes the transmission in the car. There is always a distinguished-looking doctor involved, although he may actually be a dentist from Belgium whose photograph was stolen in 2017.

In the old days, I would look at the before-and-after photographs, read three glowing reviews from women called Susan and Janet, and begin to wonder. Perhaps this really was the discovery dermatologists had been trying to suppress. Perhaps a small company operating from an undisclosed warehouse had finally cracked the secrets of human ageing. Perhaps all I needed was two bottles for $79.95, plus another bottle mysteriously added at checkout.

Now I ask ChatGPT.

I send it the link and say, “Does this work?” Then it goes rummaging through the ingredients, the evidence, the company’s claims and whatever independent information can actually be found. 

Usually, the answer is a beautifully diplomatic version of: No, Carol. Put your credit card away.

It has become my official Department of 'Suspicious Purchases'. Most of which I cleaned out the other week...

The pattern is remarkably consistent. The product often contains one perfectly reasonable ingredient, surrounded by moisturiser and magnificent advertising. There may be a tiny amount of something that has shown promise in a clinical study, but nobody tells you how much is actually in the jar. The advertisement then leaps from “this ingredient may modestly improve the appearance of pigmentation over several months” to “YOUR HANDS WILL LOOK 25 AGAIN BY THURSDAY.”

They all have thousands of delighted customers. They all sell out regularly. They have all been discovered by a woman who had tried absolutely everything and was about to give up. Sometimes her dermatologist is “amazed.” There is usually a countdown clock informing me that the special price will disappear in eleven minutes, although I can return three days later and find that the clock has made a miraculous recovery.

Since I began checking before buying, I have discovered that most miracle products fall into one of three categories: they might help slightly, they probably do nothing, or they will moisturise the area beautifully while leaving the original problem exactly where it was.

The money I have saved must be considerable. I can’t give you an exact figure because that would require admitting how many times I have been tempted by a bottle of hope with a gold lid. But between the whitening strips, memory supplements, age-spot creams, joint oils, circulation devices and mysterious magnetic objects, I may have saved enough to purchase an entirely new body. Admittedly, it would probably arrive flat-packed and require a subscription.

This doesn’t mean I never buy anything. It means the product now has to survive questioning. Are the ingredients proven? Are they present in useful amounts? Are the reviews independent? Is the dramatic photograph merely the result of different lighting, makeup and someone turning down the contrast? Is there an actual business address? And my personal favourite: if this cream genuinely removed every age spot in two weeks, why wouldn’t every dermatologist on Earth already be using it?

Occasionally, the answer is that a product may be worth trying. More often, I am told that the active ingredient is sensible but the claims are inflated, the evidence is weak and a cheaper product from the chemist will probably do the same thing. It isn’t nearly as exciting as discovering a forbidden anti-ageing breakthrough, but it is considerably better for my bank account.

So I now have a rule: before buying anything advertised as revolutionary, miraculous, clinically proven, ancient, secret, doctor-approved or “not available in shops,” I send it for interrogation.

Artificial intelligence may eventually take over the world. Until then, mine is standing between me and a $69 jar of moisturiser claiming to reverse thirty years of sun damage.

Frankly, it has already paid for itself. :')