ONE TO ONE
HOT GOSSIP Once a Britpop party animal and tabloid darling, Meg Mathews has started making very different headlines: as the country’s leading menopause activist and advisor
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By Matt Bielby
t doesn’t seem long ago that Meg Mathews was a fixture of the red-tops. Wife to Noel Gallagher, pal to Kate Moss and Sadie Frost, she was Queen Bee of the Primrose Hill set, a woman forever caught draped over her buddies in the tabs or standing, slightly more demure, in bare legs and denim jacket on the Vogue society pages. “But then, in 2017, I started getting these strange feelings,” she tells me. She’s coming to Bath in November, with a very different medication regime in mind. “I thought I’d hit a mid-life crisis, that my ’90s partying had caught up with me. Or could this odd collection of symptoms be, I wondered, something to do with my mental health? They were certainly nothing like I’d ever heard about the menopause.” But menopause they were, and Meg suddenly found her life taking a new focus. “The basic version of what everyone thinks happens is you stop having your period and might get a hot flush, but that’s not what happened with me. I felt terrible anxiety, I didn’t want to leave the house.
There was no hot flush, and I had no idea if my periods were stopping or not – I used the Mirena coil, so I didn’t bleed anyway. I was totally confused.” The truth, though, seems obvious in retrospect: Meg was going through something every woman on the planet goes through – around 13 million in the UK alone, she says, at any one time – and she didn’t understand it. More frighteningly, hardly anyone else seemed to either. And the symptoms for everyone, Meg suspects, are getting worse. “Everything’s conspiring against us,” she says. “Pollution, 4G, Brexit, the cost of living, the rain forests burning down – it all means our lives are so much more stressful than our grandmothers’ were. And these days there aren’t always older women around to help. My own mum passed away five years ago this August, for instance, so I basically had no-one to speak to.” Really? Has life actually got that much worse? “It seems to me that it has. It certainly isn’t as easy as it used to be in the ’80s and ’90s, which were brilliant.” Hanging out with movie stars in Primrose Hill, maybe…
“Our lives are so much more stressful than our grandmothers’ were. And there aren’t always older women around to help”
78 I BATH LIFE I www.mediaclash.co.uk
This content was taken from Bath Life issue 402. This information was correct at the time
