When I was young it was called a glandular fever-lith.

What do the following people have in common: Michael Jackson, Alfred the Great, Rod Serling, Franz Ferdinand, Sappho, Herve Villechaize, Kenny Everett and Kurt Weill? 

If you answered "Well, they're all FABULOUS," then congratulations, I get that reference. If you answered "They're all famous and I have heard of them," then congratulations again, because that is very true. If you answered "They all died at the age of fifty," then I am genuinely impressed, because I didn't know that until five minutes ago, when I morbidly asked Google for a list of "famous people who died at fifty."

There they are. Look at 'em. You could have had Veronica Lake, Steve McQueen and Basho to boot. All of them snuffed it at the half a century mark. Five decades of living then POW - out, out brief candle. M J danced backwards, wore a glove, sang like a robot doing sit-ups and was not safe in the soft play area. Alfred the Great united the Kingdoms of England (sort of, mostly the bits round Basingstoke) and died of piles. Kenny was an ageless pixie who delighted all children my age, and whose show I wasn't allowed to watch as Hot Gossip was too rude. Franz Ferdinand was shot by an idiot and somehow started a World War he never got to hear about. Sappho invented lesbianism and its been a roaring success. Huge, rich, full lives, echoing down the centuries, and all dead before their time. Rod Serling is one of my favourite guys. Imagine if he had lived to seventy? 

Why are you interested in this, John? Well, I'll tell you: at the end of this month I'll be celebrating and/ or scraping my head with bits of sharpened coral, a significant birthday. Its a big one. A monolithic marker on life's poorly tarmac-ed highway. A great, resounding gong that a big fat bald man in a nappy will just not leave alone. It's there, slowly swollen on the horizon, and bigger, fatter and darker every day. It looks like it could eat the sun. I'm going to be old. 

I'm not looking forward to it. Because I've squandered my decades. I have flung them decadently over my shoulders like a fat King's chicken legs. What's a decade? There'll be another one along in a minute. I've got loads to spare. Except I haven't, not any more. 

I have never advertised cigarettes on an American Science Fiction television show. I've never thrown bottles of wine at James Bond on a Chinese Junk. I've never written Gebrauchmusik - certainly not on purpose. Its a reckoning. Its a time for addressing the things left undone, and the things that I will now never do. I've been working flat out for the last seven years and I'm nowhere near where I want to be. That is the price I pay for taking the previous 43 years off. I'm making time. But you can never make time. You can only spend it and the cupboards are looking increasingly bare. 

Obviously if I count my blessings there are many. And its probably not good for your mental health to compare your achievements to those of Herve Villechaize. Though I know I will now never dress up like the Man from Delmonte and indicate the arrival of a plane to Ricardo Montalban. I will increasingly have to look on as people glaze over when I riff on my "Fantasy Island" material. The seventies, the decade of my birth, really was a very long time ago. The present is chokingly present. I'm drowning in the now, treading water and glancing over my shoulder at a slick of chicken bones.