Stylists... Meet Your Worst Nightmare

Dream of having experts attending to your wardrobe, home and diet, at the tap of a button? Tanya Gold didn’t. Here’s what happened when she spent a week trying the Uber of lifestyle.

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My life isn’t terrible, but it is chaos; most days I feel like I live in a filthy hotel room peopled by badly dressed maniacs who cannot find the bin. I am happy – well, sort of, but I am 43, and if you haven’t worked out how to make yourself happy at my age there is something seriously wrong with you.

The core is holding, but the outside is flaky. Flat, clothing, food – all are flaky. I seem to have decided that I can look after certain aspects of myself but not all – who could? So I look after my work and my skin. I care a lot about my work, and think about it all the time. I suspect I am a workaholic, which is a world of grief all its own. I also look after my skin; well, the skin on my face. It is as if I had 30 children, and I chose two of them to cherish, and let the rest die in a house fire.

My appearance: I stopped caring about my appearance the very day I realised that I no longer needed men to succeed at work; and that was 10 years ago. It was like the bell tolling midnight at the prince’s ball: one moment I was hot, in my ’90s black velvets and red lipsticks, the next, I looked like a tarmacked drive. It was about some deep, repressed anger – of course it was – but never mind that now. The fact is: I got fat and I wore the same, sad clothes and looked at the woman of my twenties as a stranger; but at some point I realised I was not just punishing the men I feared, or wanted, but myself.

Just last week I glanced at myself in a shop window and thought: you look like a woman who has given up. But you haven’t given up. So why are you pretending that you have? Why do you eat like an ant stuck in a sugar mountain, and then go out and put on ant-coloured clothes? Why do you dress like a giant ant that has survived the apocalypse?