ONE TO ONE Meet Meg Mathews the country’s leading menopause activist

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 By Matt Bielby This content was taken from Bath Life issue 402. This information was correct at the time

It 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”

Meg Mathews: once the face of hip Primrose Hill, now bringing her message to the British everywoman

“But whoever you are, whatever you are, the big thing with the menopause is that we don’t talk about it – and we should, because it happens to every single woman. I’ve never got my head around why we talk about periods and pregnancy in schools, but never mention the menopause. Why is nobody preparing us for what’s going to happen to us?”

Well, not quite nobody. There’s now Meg, with her website, Meg’s Menopause; less than two years old, it’s been a massive hit, and turned Meg into the somewhat unlikely face and voice of the menopause in the UK, and a dedicated campaigner through newspaper features and daytime TV. Is the tide turning on this, do you think? Are we finally starting to learn how to talk about the menopause a little more? We are – but because I’m a celebrity, people still find it funny. They say, ‘Oh, look at her, she’s lost her libido, she’s all dried up, she’s over the hill.’ But I can take it. Not many would want to become the face of the menopause, maybe, but I’ve found it somehow empowering. I’m certainly more comfortable talking about it now, in my fifties, than I ever would have been in my twenties or my thirties. After all, what have I got to lose, really? Do that, and you’ll feel like you’re 25 again… Not quite! When I was young I had such an easy ride. I never had a heavy period or period pain, never took a day off games. I was never all ‘kill your boyfriend’ with PMS. I gave birth in an hour and 15 minutes, then got up and had a shower. But in your early fifties it all changed. God said, ‘Here you go’ – and floored me. I didn’t leave the house for three months; I told everyone I had glandular fever. There are around 30 known symptoms of the menopause, and I had 27 of them. My quality of life went completely downhill. You put on weight, you have no energy, and the thought of going to the gym makes you sick. So what should women do? Go along to see their GP?

Yes, of course – but remember, they may not know a great deal about the menopause either. I’d suggest finding a menopause expert, and doing your own research. It doesn’t help, of course, that we get so much conflicting information: first we’re told HRT might cause cancer, then we’re told it doesn’t, then there’s a scare again… It means I’m very careful about commenting on things – I won’t do it until I’m 100 per cent certain. “When I was young I had such an easy ride. Then God said, ‘Here you go’ – and floored me”

So are you all the way through the menopause yourself now? Out the other side, though I’ll keep taking Hormone Replacement Therapy until I’m 99. I take testosterone, progesterone and oestrogen – and feel great, actually. I’ve got my energy back, and life is practically normal again. I say ‘practically’, because I still get days when I don’t feel as good, or can’t sleep at night. But there are ways to cope with that too – often as basic as eating healthily, and drinking lots of water. Basically, looking after yourself. Part of the problem seems to be that everyone’s menopause story is different… Hardly any are the same. And while it’s true that some HRTs are running out, others aren’t – and you can usually swap over, though women don’t always know this. My favourites are the ones you rub into the skin, as there’s no danger of it going into the liver and causing clotting. They help with the libido, help you become more active – but using testosterone doesn’t mean you’re going to turn into a man. You’re taking just the tiniest amount. Some women can’t use HRT

Meg’s MM range is subtle enough that you can pop ’em in your shopping bag and nobody will notice, she says – and cheap enough that your partner won’t question the cost, either

for medical reasons, and I feel so sorry for them – but if you can, you probably should. Millions of women are suffering right now when they don’t need to.

Does it feel like talking about the menopause has become your life? I definitely think, ‘This is what I should be doing’ – far more than I ever did with my interior design, or the other stuff I did. This seems important – and partly because I’ve found I have a voice, and am being listened to. People always want to talk to the celebrity rather than the expert, but I’ve made sure I’m backed up by a solid panel of medical women. When there’s something I don’t know, I go straight to people like Dr Louise Newson, an amazing menopause specialist, to find out.

What are the most important things you can do to help? My diary’s fully booked into 2020, five days a week, talking with the press or going into big companies and explaining ways to manage the menopause with their staff. I’ve done talks at the Foreign Office twice now. There might be 3,000 women in an organisation, none of them knowing if and when their periods will come. Some might need a quiet space, some might be about to make a presentation and feel overwhelmed or have a hot flush – the idea is to make it all seem as normal as possible. Women find they’ve worked their whole lives to get to a certain place – then suddenly don’t want any more promotions, because they don’t feel they can t ake it on.

The menopause is one thing for rich, successful women to deal with, surely, and another for everyone else…? Which is why I do everything on the NHS – I never use private clinics – and why my range of MM products is pitched to be accessible too. Only a small percentage of people can pay for a £700 blood test at Harley Street. Everything I do, and everything I talk about, the whole nation can afford. That’s why you won’t find my stuff in Selfridges or Harvey Nichols or Space NK, but you will find it in Boots and Superdrug and Tesco. I’m not so much interested in the three million who could maybe afford Harley Street – I want to help the other 10 million, too. MM is growing into quite a range, isn’t it? Some products are specifically for the menopause, but others are for more general vaginal health. Keeping the PH balance of your vagina is so important, because it’s a membrane, yet your body almost abandons it during the menopause; it decides you no longer need to be moist down there. Back in the olden days, if I was living in a tribe of cave people, nobody – not nature and certainly not the other cave people – would want me running around as an old women, trying to fornicate with all the bold young warriors. They’d rather I sat back, giving out herbs and advice and looking after the children. But because we’re living longer and have better lifestyles, you and I might have other ideas – and that’s why I made my own lubricant! Nobody wants to pay £45 for expensive lube, so mine’s just £10. How do men feel about all this? At first they laugh, or don’t want to know. But actually, once you get them talking about the menopause, there’s a lot of interest. They start thinking about their wives, their mums, their sisters – and what they went through, or will go through. What are you still surprised that women don’t know? Well, I thought I was a woman of the world and knew everything – but I had no idea, for instance, about the three basic stages: perimenopause, menopause, then postmenopause. From your early forties you might have weeks when you feel off or tearful, and you think it’s just holiday blues – but that’s perimenopause. Then you have a stage where your periods are all over the place – one every three months, maybe – and that’s the menopause. It can go on for years. The last one is postmenopause, which is when you’ve not had a period for 12 months. Typically people start going through the menopause around age 51, but one in a hundred women starts between 40 and 45. I’ll stand in front of a room of 300 women and ask who knows this, and maybe five hands will go up. And the more we do that, the easier it will get for everyone? I want the taboos and the stigma to go. We’ve made such strides with LGBTQ and mental health issues, so I’m now starting to lobby government to pay more attention to the menopause. We need more training for GPs, bringing them all up to date on best thinking, but we also need more nurses in the local surgery who are specifically trained in the menopause. And we need to be more vocal ourselves. We need to complain more if we’re not being given the right help! n For more, www.megsmenopause.com “Well, I thought I was a woman of the world and knew everything – but I had no idea, for instance, about the three basic stages”

Amongst the lesser known menopause symptoms, Meg says, are dental problems, joint pain and electric shocks