Hilary Fannin: Moody, middle-aged and neurotic? Give us a break

I was sitting in the very small seat of an aircraft with a very big sandwich and a smuggled-on-board black coffee. I was escaping to London for a night to visit a friend who was being hurled around the National Health Service like an astronaut in a renegade capsule. He had had the ground whipped from under him on more than one occasion.

“Why do you want to know your prognosis? What difference would it make?” the young doctor had asked him the day before, her clipboard in her sanitised hand, her bedside manner left at home in her sock drawer.

On the flight there was a man in the row in front of me, reading a newspaper and chortling. I stuck my beady eyes through the gap in the seats to see what was so amusing, inadvertently dislodging the knee sockets from the nostrils of the passenger next to me.

I know I haven’t got taller, so when did legroom become passé? And what did they do with their paltry saved inches? Recycle them into grilled cheese sandwiches? Put in a row of toadstools for commuting pixies? Next time I go to London, I’ll swim.

The mood changed

Anyway, the headline causing my fellow passenger such merriment read something like: “Moody middle-aged women more prone to Alzheimer’s.” Oh yes, laugh a minute that article was. I picked it up from his empty seat after we’d spent three days circling the airport.

Allow me to paraphrase wildly here: research has shown that women who suffer poor moods and neurotic behaviour are more likely than their chilled-out sisters to the long-term losing of their marbles. So if you routinely find yourself eating excessive amounts of sliced pan in front of The Xtra Factor, getting into the green bin to search for your passport and occasionally chucking handfuls of cat lit at your loved ones, watch out.

Surprise, surprise: it seems that those among us less likely to end up sucking baby rice out of a straw, putting the kettle in the freezer and endlessly flooding the bathroom are those with healthier lifestyles. Presumably that means if you’re in a running club or sudoku circle, if you’re a green-bean-growing water-butt enthusiast with your Birkenstocks burning up the rubber on the Camino, you’re hunky-dory.

Testing times

The article also said some whip-sharp, boffin-designed test had been developed to measure neuroticism. (What do you mean, test? Do I look like I need a test? What kind of test exactly?)

Those who scored highly and who also had high levels of long-standing stress – more commonly referred to as marriage, parenting and trying to make a living – have double the risk of developing dementia.

Oh fab. My plastic cup of mashed-up turnip runneth over. The writing is on the damn wall.

So, the good news is that a healthy diet and daily exercise are key ways to protect against dementia. On your bike with your spinach and asparagus shake, and you’ll remain sharp as a new pin, able to decipher your bank statements and tally up your water charges until the genome-altered cows come home.

Far be it from me to chuck a bucket of tepid and unscientific water over the terribly important findings of the clever people who designed the test. People who were poring over textbooks and polishing oscilloscopes (if you can polish an oscilloscope?) while I was doing the washing-up, singing along to the Home and Away theme tune and trying to master a moonwalk, but, man alive, give us a break.

Everyone is moody sometimes; everyone is neurotic sometimes. At some stage everyone will want to cushion their lives with a jam doughnut or a case of Chateauneuf du I Can’t Take it Any More. The tapestry of every life will unravel from time to time, and I don’t really believe that a vegan empire or a bucket of Zen can offer us that much protection when the threads start to fray.

I had a good time with my London friend. We ate fish and chips in a bar; life in many gory and glorious forms passed our table. Later, after he had gone, I smoked a roll-up in the rain, on a street in Chelsea, and yes I know that’s certainly not in any rulebook for wellbeing.

But there we are, what more do you expect from a moody middle-aged woman in a downpour.