Well on the way to cat overload

When you’re young, eccentricity is endearing, doing your own thing a style statement. Later in life, though, things are different. Opt for individuality and it’s taken for oddness, while refusal to follow the herd is seen as the inevitable first step to lonerdom and all points south, taking in carrier bag hoarding, cat overload and shouting at complete strangers in bus queues en route.

Self-help books aren't much help. They're good at telling you how to be young and lovelorn, and positively inspired when it comes to actually being dead – covering everything from ensuring a dazzling eulogy at your funeral to obtaining probate.

But the fact that I won’t be around to read them at the crucial moment severely limits their usefulness.

No wonder the authors are at a loss. All our lives we’ve been fed images that are big on redemption and happy endings, and then we approach middle age and suddenly it’s like being cast as ‘Ugly Betty’ but without the transformation scene at the end of the series.

What worries me is how I’m going to fit in. Admittedly, fitting in has never been one of my career strengths, but then it’s never mattered before.

People like me are politely known as ‘characters’ This signals the countdown to the moment other mothers scare their badly behaved children witless by threatening to employ me as a babysitter. And there’s no convenient slot we can be squeezed into. Society, let's face it, abhors a misfit almost as much as a vacuum. For infants, the big worry is failure to thrive. For older women, it’s failure to conform.

The problem is that credible role models for older women are thin on the ground. In fact, there are just two.

Model A, the sweet little old lady version, shows no signs of being eased into decent obscurity, despite decades of honourable service as a national cliché. According to folklore she runs on knitting, cups of tea and homemade cake.

Or there's Model B, the Botox brigade, woman in denial about ageing and death and attempting to use super-strength depilatories - the modern alternative to cloves of garlic – to ward them off.

I will, no question, be to either category as Polonium 210 is to lemon drizzle cake.

Take small talk, for example. Most people don’t just accept it, but actively enjoy exploring the nuances of steam irons, say, or seasonal isobar variations.

To me, though, it’s the conversational equivalent of a near-death experience, but without the excitement of the bright lights and men in white coats. And while I haven’t given up on my one-woman crusade to introduce big, interesting life and death topics, the more controversial the better, it does mean I spend most parties deep in political analysis with the hat stand.

God knows, I've attempted to conform. For the first time in my life I recently offered to be on a committee. I wasn’t selected, though. My neighbourhood groans under the weight of so many would-be committee members that I’m convinced they’re being bred in captivity by top scientists and then released into the wild as a state-sponsored joke.

So I’ve run out of things to join, and, truth to tell, there’s little point making the effort. If sweet little old lady or Botox queen are all that’s on offer, I’d almost prefer an early death and reincarnation as a beetle, though I’d bet self-help books for invertebrates are even thinner on the ground than those for middle-aged women.

Where next? Where do eccentric women end up? Or by posting this in Blogland, have I already provided myself with the answer?