FIVE-OH

I rang a friend the other day because it was her birthday, because, you know, despite the fact that I am very, very poor at certain of the so-called “social niceties”, every once in a while I do seem to summon up the spark of energy required to make something approaching the effort required.

Anyway, I rang her and, rather to my surprise and disbelief, she pointed out that not only was it her birthday, but it was her 50th birthday, the big “five-oh”, the half century…

As I vividly remembered attending her 21st birthday party in the days when I was still a bit of a student, this came as something of a shock…

How, after all, can we all be pushing 50…??? Us, the young whippersnappers, the genius generation who were going to go out and change the world…? All those hopeful, bright young faces who still stare out of my fading photo albums, sitting on sunny lawns and remain still full of hope and optimism and the sense that they already know how the world works…

The mighty “we” who thought we knew everything, thought we’d change everything and weren’t going to let anything get in our way…

And then, you know, life kind of happened…

How can I be pushing fifty…? I’m still a flippin’ kid, for Pete’s sakes…

I certainly still feel like one, and I sure as hell still act like one most of the time…

I don’t even have a “grown-up” house, or a “grown-up” car or have to do any of the “responsible” things that other “grown-ups” seem to find a right royal pain in the arse, judging by what they have to say about it.

It’s funny really, because the actual numerical values of those so-called “big” birthdays, those “decade makers” dreaded by so many, have never really bothered me all that much. They are, after all, just numbers, and numbers are not to be feared, but the thought of all that time now past and gone and wasted, now that does concern me, as does the way it presently seems to be flying down the toilet at such a rate of knots that it hardly seems worthwhile taking down the Christmas decorations before I’m hanging them back up again.

Just under ten years ago, I went away on a “special” holiday which was given as a gift to me for my 40th… How can that now be getting on for being 20% of my entire time spent on this planet ago…? How can that decade have spun by in the blink of an eye, when the first couple seemed to drag on for an eternity? This year’s already hurtling towards being a quarter over and I barely feel like the diary is out of the cellophane…

So, the big “five-oh” is looming, and it doesn’t feel right, somehow. Fifty-year-old people don’t look and act like me and the people I know, or at least they didn’t used to. They were dignified and seemed to give the impression that they knew what life was all about. Back then, they appeared to have wisdom, hats and sensible overcoats, not hair gel, baseball caps and shock-absorbing trainers.

Still, I’m not quite there yet because there’s still over a year to go, although that year will be gone before I even think of anything that I can do with it…

Perhaps I ought to go and see what bargains I can find in the pound shop…?

No… no… no… no… NOOOOO!!!