TWENTY-THREE AND A QUARTER YEARS

In twenty-three and a quarter years, if the fates allow it (and which of us can ever be sure that they will?), I shall be seventy years old. Now to some of you that might seem a long way off, but, to me, it seems like it might very well seem like hardly any time at all. This is because it is also almost exactly twenty-three and a quarter years since I staggered blinking and fearful into the offices of a certain Yellow Book of advertisements which was the company where I started working at my very first ‘proper’ job. Sometimes, those twenty-three and a quarter years can seem like they’ve passed in just the blink of an eye. Certainly those strange first ‘grown up’ days in what I laughably considered to be the ‘real world’ back then (how little I knew) sometimes only feel like yesterday, which, by the extension of logical progression, can only mean that should I even reach my seventies, then it’ll probably only be tomorrow when I do.

It’s an odd thing, age. Ultimately those numbers by which we measure the years passing are just numbers. On the day of your thirtieth birthday, you’re only one day older than you were the day before, but somehow, people (or should I say “people”…?) other than yourself seem to make such a bloody big deal about these so-called ‘significant’ dates. Sigh! Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really been a ‘party person’ that I really don’t give a rat’s kidney about the notion of being thirty, or forty or fifty, to me they just prove one thing; If you are lucky enough to reach one of these ages, then you’re not dead yet. Depending upon who you are, that is, I suppose, worth marking if not actually ‘celebrating’.

Looking back across the last twenty-three and a quarter years, I realise that actually, my first morning at that job remains a bit of a blur, but I was most probably terrified. I may very well have remained terrified ever since, however, I suspect that, despite the cocksure arrogance that many of us choose to display under such circumstances, we all probably are really. I certainly remember being utterly terrified of my future team leader because he seemed so sensible, and so grown up. I’d found him so terribly sober (not in the drinking sense of the word) and conservative in comparison to the chap who interviewed me (a fine fellow, you may very well have read about him hereabouts…), because he was the one who had to give me ‘the test’ to prove that I had the basic skills necessary for honing into the requirements of the strange world of visualisation. Naturally, he turned out to be one of the nicest people who ever lived, which only goes to show how good a judge of people I am.

Within the first few months one of that team I joined would get married (and later leave) and I would go to the first work-related ‘social event’ that I recall attending which was her wedding. Now, not only is it strange that I would willingly attend such an event (not least because I still have to be… not exactly ‘sedated’ to go along to one, but, let’s just say it does take rather a lot of effort to persuade me into it…) but, as a barely known face who probably had been too shy to even exchange more than half a dozen words with the girl during the entire time we worked ‘together’, it was rather surprising that I should be asked to go along at all. Still, perhaps it did break the ice, and the social lubricant of a few pints of beer might just have opened me up to being more chatty and ‘open’ at work, although the images of various colleagues performing the infamous Black Lace “Superman” dance routine is still burnt onto my eyeballs. I can still see them now, performing all the movements, silhouetted in the darkness, if I close my eyes and try to picture it.

Shudder!

Another rather vivid early memory is of one of the team leaders and her bump. She was about to go off on maternity leave and, being a friendly and inclusive soul, liked to share contact with the bump with whoever wanted to. In those early, youthful months, I was of course much too shy for such intimacy, although in later years we did get on rather well, but I always thought that she went off on that leave wondering quite who this strange, potato-featured, stand-offish and silent youngster was, and why on earth he’d been taken on board. I imagine that she probably thought that the whole place was going to hell in a handcart and she was well out of it.

Then there was also the ritual humiliation of the administrator as he reached the great age of forty, and the office was suitably decorated to reflect this great event. In those pre-photoshop days, the clip-art style library images pasted around the room probably didn’t quite resemble him as much as they might do nowadays, but they still got the required response from him for those of us to whom forty was an unimaginably great and amusingly ancient age, and one which I have since zoomed past myself (fairly anonymously and with little fanfare) the greater part of a decade ago.

Age was also an issue when one of my colleagues asked me how old I was and I automatically said ‘twenty-two’ out of habit, and later on I had to apologise when I realised that I was actually twenty-four and had completely forgotten about the two birthdays that I’d had since anyone had bothered to ask me that question.

Strange, but true.

Nowadays I imagine that it was because I had been just one of the great hordes of unemployed for the previous eighteen months and my memory was in the process of busily sweeping away every trace of the humiliation and disgrace I put myself through during that time. In those days I was far too young and far too foolish and would have put far too much importance upon such things, although completely forgetting my birthdays (and other peoples…) was something that I later came to make something of a habit of, it seems rather odd that I would have been doing it at an age where parties and celebrations were something that people (or should I say “people”…?) seemed to enjoy.

The older I get the more I realise that there is no closure, there are no answers, just more and more questions. Twenty-three and a quarter years ago I quite possibly walked around thinking that I knew everything. By the time that (with any luck) I get twenty-three and a quarter years older, I’ll probably just have got used to the idea that I know nothing. Somewhere in that near half century of living, with all its losses, fears and mistakes, and the few glimmers of success and happiness, there will, I’m sure, be just a moment of truth, balance and enlightenment.

Although I probably never even noticed it when it happened.