Fifty

I'm fifty. That's both incredible and utterly banal. It means I've existed for half a century and, as I'm unlikely to continue existing for the second half, this feels like a reasonable time to look back on my so-called life. I can be relatively certain of some events, though I have a terrible memory and I'm an increasingly unreliable narrator. But who wants a reliable narrator? Everybody does, John, but they can't have one, not this time. Sorry. 

It's my fiftieth birthday. It is also ten years since Kelly died and ten years since I moved to Northern Ireland. It's a big year to be stuck in the house doing nothing. The last ten years have been the most extraordinary of my life. My fortieth birthday party was in a bar in North London. I had a wife and a job and friends, some of whom I'd known for twenty years. We were leaving London - it was a leaving party - to move to Belfast and start a new life. Kelly was still promised life then - between two and five years was the expectation, reduced from ten. In fact she had four months left, but we couldn't have known that then. 

She's now been gone for twice as long as I ever knew her. 

My life has changed beyond recognition in the last decade. Your forties is an unusual age to reinvent yourself and I was only partially successful - I'm still very much the lazy, hesitant ditherer I have been for five decades. But I do work now, at least. I do what I say I'm going to do and I do it quickly and well, and with the bare minimum of screaming at people.  And I'll do pretty much anything. Later this year I'm going to be directing some films. Why not? Ten years ago I was the complaints manager for a Legal Publisher, now I'm a playwright and film director. My first short story is published this year. I have a feature film in development. I wrote 15 episodes of a satirical animation last year and produced thirteen episodes of my own podcast.  I wrote a novel, did several paintings and recorded some songs. The ideas keep popping, more and more in fact, as I become practiced in recognising them and refining them. 

I find suddenly, at the age of fifty, that I have a lot I want to say, at precisely the point that society would like me to shut my gammon mouth. It may well be that I have nothing to offer the world - today I read the head-line: "Lindsay Lohan is selling a Daft Punk NFT for $15,000", and wondered what any of that sentence had to do with the National Film Theatre. So I spent whole minutes trawling through a nonsense land of Non-Fungible Tokens, cryptocurrencies, Blockchain gaming and Nyan Cats (an animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso, flying through space, and leaving a rainbow trail behind it, obviously).

And I never really mastered Game-and-Watch. I still think the "Pop-O-Matic" dice on "Frustration" is pretty edgy. I may get left behind. 

I have friends who are on  Twitch, and they're on line doing crosswords and cooking soup, while strangers make animated pandas dance on their faces. I don't understand what anyone gets from that, but as long as they're happy...then cool. I mean, there is obviously space for that, there's space for everything, so equally there must be a place for my old fashioned tales of drunkenness and avarice, of self-pity, wit and poetry. I don't believe that society has sloughed off countless millennia of drama and passion, of good and evil, wanking jokes and horror. Its all in there still, bubbling beneath the surface, waiting for an eruption. We're the same people we were in The Canterbury Tales, or The Decameron or all those fairy tales about woodcutters and wolves. We're still scared of the dark, still lost in the wild wood, still looking for a trail of crumbs or a hand to hold. 

I have to believe that. Because that's what I write about. 

When Dave Bowie was fifty he invented Bowie Bonds and made $55 million over night. I don't expect to make that sort of money this year, but we can't all be Dave Bowie. Not even Dave Bowie is Dave Bowie anymore, and he was really good at it. I've written him into two short stories, so I'm making a film about theatre and a book about music - I'll be dancing to architecture any day now. 

I would have liked a party for my fiftieth. Or at least I'd have liked to have gone out and made some noise somewhere, raging hard before the dying of the light, you know, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

I did nothing for my birthday last year, as that was at the start of the lock-down, but I assumed something approaching normality would have returned by the time of my fiftieth. How naive for one so old. I should have realised that Boris Johnson's populist government would fuck it up time and time again, leaving 125,000 bodies in their wake. They aren't trying their best - if they're trying their best they aren't fit for government. What they're actually doing is earning money for their pals and pooh poohing the advice of experts. It's very much business as usual for the Tories, but for some reason Boris still wants to be loved. I wonder what his parents actually did to him. And it makes no sense - the Tories don't need to appease the people: the British people will always vote for them. The Conservatives have fucked everything up for a decade. They engineered, with their tabloid lackeys, an unnecessary and damaging Brexit. They've prevaricated and pissed around and illegally sold contracts to their friends who are utterly unqualified to fulfill them, and Boris Johnson is still popular, still a legend. I read today that he's setting up a charity to pay for the redecoration of his flat. Why not? He can do what he wants. Its just a bit of an old laugh. What a character: Mr Tumble with blood on his hands. 

So he killed Eddie Large and Tim Brooke Taylor and I can't go to the pub on my birthday. Thanks, Prime Minister. Got a pithy three world phrase for me? Fuck off, Granddad? Doesn't even rhyme - it would look shit on the podium as you address the nation. At least do it in Latin: Regredior, Pate Magnam. 

Yes, I would have liked a party. But I don't know if I'd be able to manage the sensory overload at this point. Being in a room with more than two people would be like being cornered in a ship's cabin by plague rats. I don't trust people not to spray their aerosols - I'm sorry, I'll read that again - all over me, especially when they're drunk. I've already decided what I'm going to cook for my birthday dinner: poulet au moutard and I'm going to drink another bottle of Meerlust Rubicon. I am a man of simple pleasures. Quiet, simple pleasures. I fear my showing off days are behind me. Actually, fear is the wrong word - I'm grateful my showing off days are behind me. I need all my energy for typing and sounding plausible on Zoom calls. 

So I'm fifty and I still have hair, though its white and has the texture of asbestos. I have some teeth too, though they're as jagged and stained as a Julian Schnabel crockery painting. I hurt somewhere new every day. It's actually quite thrilling: like "Whack-A-Mole" except you're constantly bringing the hammer down on your own body. I now have two pairs of glasses: one for seeing far away and one for seeing near. I don't bother with the middle. Fuck it. What happens in the middle? Apart from spreading. 

Old age has meant body hair arrived in overwhelming profusion, an unnecessary winter coat I have to drag about all year round despite humans having had access to clothes for quite some time now. I read recently that the urban fox's snout has evolved to rummage more successfully through city bins in the last thirty years. Human beings have had jumpers for centuries, so what's with all the back hair? Or the ear hair? And the nose hair? My eye brows jut out an inch, thick as copper wire. I fail to see the evolutionary advantage of looking like Bert out of Bert and Ernie. The truth is that I am genetically identical to my Cro-Magnon ancestors, and should have been dead for fifteen years by now. All there is from here on in is an opportunity to walk slowly, to hear less and to not understand how the TV controls work. I can't wait and luckily I wont have to, as its right around the corner. 

Do I smell now? Probably. Old person smell - bad breath and Brylcreem. Clouds of dandruff circling me like a pointillist halo. If I could get the lighting right it would probably look quite good, the gauzy haze of a Beautyface filter. I've still got my limp, and the fatter I get the more the cartilage in my knee is going to take a pummeling. So a lot to look forward to. I fell over in the street the other day. I better learn to drop and roll. 

I have reached the point where people think I'm a boring old fart before I even open my mouth. I contend that while I may be an old fart, I am at least an interesting one, though an interesting old fart is arguably worse than a boring one - you want to know what your fart's going to do next at my age. Obviously I am now invisible to women, but I do retain a glamorous fascination for White Van Men. They wind down their windows, they beep their horns, they yell what sounds like abuse but could equally be a string of compliments followed by a phone number. We just don't know. I'm not sure what it is about me that is so provocative to a man drinking a can of Boost in a liveried Transit, but my power to confuse, to captivate, and to dazzle remains intact. Age has not withered me, nor custom staled my infinite singularity. I am van nip. 

I've lost friends along the way. Mostly it was neglect and some of that neglect was mine. This last year has been particularly hard, speaking to people only through social media or Zoom, with everything amplified and distorted, its easy to find slights and take offense, stupid things that would slide off you in more socially flexible times. Here we are staring gloomily like Narcissus into the pool, noticing that we're not that pretty anymore, inside and out. I would like to apologise to all the people I've upset and let down, in a mealy-mouthed and slightly passive aggressive way. Sorry. Happy now? I mean it wasn't just me...

A career in politics surely beckons. 

I started smoking at some point in the past and I gave up smoking at another point in the past. I'm not sure I ever actually enjoyed smoking so it wasn't that hard to give up. I maintain I started doing it out of politeness - people kept asking me if I wanted a fag and eventually I complied. This would not happen now as individual cigarettes cost more than gold and saffron combined. Newsagents no longer sell singles under the counter to schoolchildren, as there are no longer any newsagents. 

I still paint occasionally. I've been painting for fifty years and I'm still bad at it. Every time I start a new painting I forget how to do it. Every one of my paintings is a real-time art lesson and they are all disappointments. And yet I still do it. This must be what it's like to have children, something I have never got round to, and now never will. Sometimes that makes me sad. Other times it makes me very grateful indeed. I don't know that I would have been much of a parent. I'm not even much of an uncle and my nephews and nieces are LOW maintenance. I'm very lucky with my family - I like them. Is it good that you're related to your best friends or is that low level narcissism? No, they're good eggs. Decent, silly, funny people. They are kind and I like them a lot. 

I have no money. That's been a constant in my life. I have never had any money. People don't like paying me, so I expect I was destined for a life in the Arts. I should have worked that out sooner, but I'm not especially bright. I could have been writing since my twenties, earlier. But I didn't write anything. I spent the time mooning over women, drinking and trying to be cool. The amount of time spent trying to look cool was tragic. And if I was trying to be cool I could never be cool. That is the Tao of Cool.  A lot of people were fooled though. I did look cool. Whatever that means. Luckily the definition of cool changes over time and the thing that I have become is very much the opposite of the modern definition. The relief is extraordinary: like being unshackled from a madman. A madman picking out your clothes, policing your tastes and telling you who and what to like. Fuck off cool, you poisonous prick. 

But I'm pretty happy. I'm doing things I enjoy. I'm learning new things at precisely the point in life where a lot of people my age would be thinking of slowing down. I'm like a Job Club success story. I have no pension or savings so I'm open to any new experience, as long as it isn't the Workhouse. I hope I still have a lot of interesting things left to do. I've done a lot of moaning here, so in the interest of balance: I love and am loved, and I always have been. I've known a lot of really excellent people - and some proper cardboard - and I've laughed a lot. Though, tell my face (see fig A.) I'm sat in a room on a sunny day, looking out into a garden where birds feed off a bird table. I can listen to any music I like and there are good books on the shelves and fine art prints on the wall. I had a bacon sandwich for breakfast and a very successful Zoom meeting. I have no reason to complain. 

I resisted this last paragraph for fear of it looking bitterly ironic after I'm struck down by a series of calamities in the near or far future - I am touching every stick of wood in the house with my non-typing hand. But its important to acknowledge that a decade that started with the worst thing that ever happened to me* has ended in happiness, contentment and love, thanks to Susan Garnett. Its no overstatement to say she has saved my life - she gave me a life. I was running (limping) myself into the ground when I met her and she has shown me that it is possible to live in this terrible - and seemingly worsening world - and to be happy. She has a rare gift, a genius for delight. 

*I appreciate the idea of Kelly's death "happening to me" is clumsily expressed. It didn't. It happened to her. But losing her was the most painful experience of my life, and something I still live with every day. I hope to one day untangle the joy we had from that pain, as it is unfair to her memory. She was wonderful.