If you’re reading this, I have suddenly aged. It’s my birthday on Christmas Eve. The split-flap display clacks obscenely over, to a once-unthinkable number. The knees ready themselves to explode. The howling between the ears picks up. Have you ever had a moment where you felt suddenly old? My most recent was during my daily diatribe against e-scooters and e-bikes. Can’t stand ’em, flying down footpaths, headlights full bore like the cycloptic offspring of a Gorgon and Thomas the Tank Engine. In between prayers not to be mown down, I thought: “Doesn’t anybody pedal any more?” This spontaneous thought haunts me. But that wasn’t the worst.
I heard myself describing an emerging grime artist as a young fella the other week. But that wasn’t it either. Nor the memory of staring out of a window and announcing, “It’s really coming down now,” prompting a friend present – greater in years than me – to mockingly describe me as “an old head on old shoulders”.
I’ll tell you what it was. I’ve started going to the library every day. Ah, the creamy pleasures of routine! Bran-based breakfast, a day in the stacks, dinner with heavy cutlery. All fine. Very “hip”. Until the morning I realised I could drink tea all day, by taking a Thermos flask in with me. It was this little triumph – the I-could-sneak-tea-into-the-library moment – that made me realise a Rubicon had been crossed.
I’m an acute case. But there’s something about Christmas, a year’s end, that makes many people feel the same. Something to do with that December tiredness, cold air chapping blue-veined skin. Perhaps you go home and meet friends from school, at the pub where you once needed fake ID. Their eyes have seen other things now, as have yours. Their skin hangs differently. Or it doesn’t, in ways that whisper the lengths we go to deny time.
I think about the people who didn’t post their Spotify Wrapped, ashamed their favourite artist includes Bruce Springsteen for the 13th year running. Or the greater existential trapdoor – bands that occupy the mental category of new and cool, whether it’s MGMT or CSS or Kurt Vile, only for some wretched little internet video to inform you that one song you liked turned 37 last year.
I have friends who are terrified of turning 30, and I don’t know what reaction they’re hoping for. A Marx Brothers birthday cake to the face is the obvious one. But also: I understand. I’ve been there; I will be there again. I can relate to their fear, even if the number is baby-small.
It’s easy to picture the hard bits of getting older. The seeping of beauty, strength, speed. A sense of humour that relies on advert catchphrases so covered by sand that we might as well be speaking Aramaic. It’s the good, though, that is the mystery. Becoming oneself at last. Throwing out expectations that were never yours. Actually being able to do things. I don’t think I really knew how to use a toilet brush until about five years ago. It was always someone else’s problem.
Now that home ownership, marriage and children arrive later for many, or not at all, there’s a temptation to defer the maturity process off a cliff, like a student-loan debt. But there’s a difference between running away from ageing and insisting we be allowed to do it our way. It’s good to focus on the how, not the if of it all.
Now I see mental slowness for what it also is – the sifting of experience, the expansion of my reflective capacity. No bad thing. My plan is to stick around, stay active and stay open. I think it’s possible to do both of the latter, while also craving a flask of tea. It might involve updating my political beliefs, revisiting relationships, or learning compassion for my oldest friend, my body. The one who’s been there for me in countless ways, a silent partner now getting to have its voice.
Self-acceptance is probably our best shot at peace on earth. To be honest, my only surviving political belief is that Kofi Annan is secretary general of the UN, despite the fact he’s been dead for five years.
And there are other moments. Yesterday a woman stepped in front of traffic for me, stopping the cars with an outstretched arm. I presume lollipop ladies are there for people leaving school. In my experience they look after everyone, equal opportunities, like superheroes. Her gesture of protection pierced me. You assume, once you’re a man, you’re out there on your own. But we are all handed moments when one feels like a child again.
Between tea and lollipops, our lives happen. The feeling of our bodies, the contexts we have moved through, is a shifting thing. We tell a linear story, because simplicity is a grace in storytelling. But in reality we are spirals, circling an essence, in constant motion. Never far from ourselves, yet never the same.
We are all the ages we have been. And maybe even some we haven’t. So Happy Birthday to me and Happy Christmas to you. I’m gonna pop on my Heelys, and roll right down to the garden centre. Meet you there?