Memo to Kate Moss: Drunk might be cute in your 20s but not your 40s.

“For many years this was all part of Brand Kate in all her partying, bad girl, supermodel glory. But she’s not 25 any more. She’s 41.”

It’s time for Kate Moss to calm the hell down.

Before you hook into me for my opinion being sexist or unfair or judgey, let me beat you to it: yes. Yes, you’re right.

What business is it of mine that Kate Moss got kicked off a flight for being drunk and disorderly over the weekend?

See: Kate Moss calls pilot a ‘basic bitch’, gets kicked off the plane.

None, really. But this post isn’t really about Kate Moss. It’s about grown-ups who don’t know it’s time to stop getting trashed. And I know a few of those. Do you?

Rewind: Kate Moss, supermodel (I’d say former supermodel but that sounds bitchy even if it’s true and I promise I’m not a bitch) was asked to leave an Easyjet flight on the weekend. She was on her way back from her friend Sadie Frost’s 50th birthday party in Turkey.

Apparently she was swigging vodka from a bottle concealed in her handbag and talking in a loud and highly-animated way to the family sitting next to her, including playing ‘hairdresser’ with one of their children.

Frankly, anyone prepared to play hairdresser or any kind of game with my children on a budget airline flight is a good egg. So props for that. It sounds like the kicking her off the flight part was an over-reaction on the part of the airline staff but whatever. This is hardly out of character for Moss. For decades now she has been emblematic of a certain type of party girl.

Grown up? Kate Moss and Marc Jacobs explain “Basic Bitch”.

Remember when she was photographed doing lines of coke by the UK press? Remember when she went to rehab and gave interviews admitting she’d never been sober on a catwalk during her modelling career? Remember how elegantly wasted she looked at her wedding?

For many years this was all part of Brand Kate in all her partying, bad girl, supermodel glory. We gobbled it up at the time, didn’t we? Much like she gobbled up all those substances, legal and illegal.

I used to pore over paparazzi photos of Kate Moss looking gloriously and casually dishevelled, wearing some wildly unexpected and perfect combination of clothes that looked like she’d simply picked them up off the floor where she’d discarded them the night before after a threesome.

And then I grew up and turned 40 but Kate Moss didn’t. Now I’m interested in other things. Things like wondering if I should go Paleo and worrying that I don’t understand superannuation and making a conscious effort to do my pelvic floor exercises and cursing the fact that I can’t find any decent clothes that aren’t either tiny or outrageously expensive.

Click through the gallery of Kate Moss, perpetual 25-year-old, below. Post continues after gallery. 

My idea of a good night out involves friends and nice food and good conversation and yes, wine but not a case of it. My idea of a great weekend is binge-watching Season three of House of Cards, not sleeping off a hangover. Or finding a really comfy bathrobe.

Kate Moss though, she seems to be stuck at age 25 when every weekend is New Year’s Eve and any night that ends before sunrise is just a waste.

This isn’t just about Kate Moss. I think we all have a friend who didn’t get the memo about Growing Up, am I right?

It’s not just a female thing. Lots of men continue partying hard into their 40s of course. But there’s something particularly tragic about women who do it even though this is a terrible double standard, yes I know. America’s hottest comedian right now, Amy Schumer, has written and starred in a movie about this exact phenomenon. It’s called Trainwreck and here is the trailer:

“I’m just a modern chick who does what she wants” insists Schumer’s character defending her lifestyle of boozing and casual sex that spilled out of her 20a when all her friends were doing it and into her 30s when they’d started to settle down and she was the only one in her peer group still partying like it was 1999.

Why is this so confronting when you’re one of the Settled Down? Why do we reserve a special type of pity for women who don’t get the memo that picking up strangers, dancing on tables and drinking vodka out of your handbag every weekend passes from hilarious to worrying behaviour some time around your 30th or 35th birthday?

Possibly, it’s connected to society’s expectations that every woman ‘should’ want to find a long-term mate and start having babies in her 30s. Maybe when someone boldly refuses to conform to these expectations, we feel threatened and judge her for it. Probably there is also a healthy dose of concern for a party girl’s health when drugs and alcohol are an indelible ingredient in every social encounter she has …..for decades.

Could there also be a bit of envy behind the judginess? I honestly don’t know. On the surface, personally, I’d say no. I can think of few things worse than trying to parent young children with a hangover. I genuinely worship every moment I get to spend in my pyjamas, even more so if it’s before 8pm. If I’m honest though, I guess there is a smidgen of wistfulness about how it must feel to be so totally driven by the pursuit of GOOD TIMES that consequences can go and punch themselves in the nuts. A tiny part of me misses that freedom because I feel like I lost it when I got married and had children. I can’t abandon myself to hedonistic pleasures anymore, not like I used to.

So at the same time as I’m rolling my eyes at the Kate Moss’s of this world and bemoaning their loss of dignity and control, I secretly would like to sit next to them on a plane. So long as they occupied my children…….

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