I want to change my face. I’m not talking cosmetic surgery, although if chubby cheeks could be surgically de-chubbed I’d have to consider it. Surgery can’t help me – if only it were that simple. What I seek to change is the expression on my face, my whole disposition, the face I present to the world. Mine’s all wrong, insomuch as I look as if there’s something wrong. Very often I’ll be asked what the matter is.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Sure?”
“Yes, why do you ask?”
“Well, you just look miserable.”
Point taken. Very often, when I tell a friend that all is good with me, they ask if I’ve thought about telling that to my face.
Well, now I am – I am telling my face to cheer up. I don’t know how or when it got stuck this way. It’s been at least 13 years. I know this because back then something was written in the Daily Mirror which second-mentioned me as “the gloomy 46-year-old”. Not angry, or sad, or scornful. Just gloomy. Tragic, really. And now I’m the gloomy 59-year-old.
Last month I saw this bloke in a cafe in Trieste. So entranced was I at the sunniness of his disposition that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It wasn’t just the faintest of smiles on his lips, it was the kindness in his eyes and the aura of quiet contentment. It wasn’t some smug satisfaction with his own circumstances so much as contentment with the world as a whole. He radiated the conviction that everything and everyone was just fine. It was infectious. That cafe, the square, the city, all felt afloat on a sea of gladness. It was that profound. A rising tide of serenity raises all boats.
He didn’t betray any alarm even as he registered me, this gloomy stranger, staring at him in wonder. He merely widened his eyes a little and gave an almost imperceptible nod in acknowledgment of the happy fact that life could be worse.
I want to be him instead of his opposite, exuding bleakness. It’s high time – I will be 60 next year. My seventh decade will be my cheery era. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? It just takes longer than you might hope. After a lifetime of defaulting to an upside-down smile, a resting happy face is not something you can paint on just because you like the cut of a stranger’s jib in a cafe in Trieste. I discovered this there and then when I tried a big grin on for size; it didn’t fit. Even Happy Man looked unsettled.
When you smile, the world smiles back. Not at me it doesn’t. Try as I might, I can’t smile right. Yes, I smile nicely if I bump into someone I like, or my team score a goal, or someone says something amusing – but getting a default, not-thinking-about-it, resting happy face is quite beyond me. I think it’s all the thinking about it. Out for a walk, if I was thinking non-stop about walking, I’d soon be tripping over my feet. So it is with smiling. My lips and cheeks are all over the shop, while my facial muscles are in constant motion in search of a natural smile they can live with.
I can’t settle on anything suitable. Smiling the wrong smile, especially at women, feels a bit forward; smiling at blokes might even invite a fight. WTF are you grinning at, mate? I’m spooking people. And, clocking my reflection in a shop window, I spook myself. How do I find the face I want? A survey perhaps – “Excuse me, madam, may I ask what my facial expression is conveying?” In the meantime, I’ll practise into a mirror seeking a countenance suggesting mildness, tolerance, hope, openness. Anything but gloom.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
