It's difficult to explain to someone who still thinks the Ting Tings are the height of cultural experience just how agonizing it is to watch another year slip through your fingers. When you're young, a year takes forever; each one seems to take about four decades of agonizing wait between Christmases and fresh barrages of presents and cake. Put a decade or two on that wide-eyed bright young thing and suddenly his years are passing in what seems about four seconds. If time keeps up this exponential accelleration I'm going to blast into my old age in about half an hour at four times the speed of sound.
Nothing, however, can make you feel older than looking at the state of your closest friends; unless you're Peter Stringfellow, your closest friends are all likely around the same age and probably, predominantly, the same gender, and as hard as it is to see yourself as anything other than the strutting rock God you probably thought you were at seventeen, it's all too easy to notice age creeping up on those closest to you, and somewhere in the deepest reaches of your addled psyche, you know that it's getting to you as well. I have a friend who started going bald in his teens, and for years his retorts to my adolescent jibes have been parried by a simple toss of my thick and lustrous head of hair, but I know that, as I race headlong towards my fifties, which come every New Year feels, and indeed is, that one vast step closer, I'm going to start losing mine as well. My grandfather did, his father did, and his father did, and, as genetics has so cruelly predetermined, so will I. I will also widen, shorten and get angrier, I know this, because the signs are already there; while I'm still the proud owner of a perfectly luxuriant mop of hair, the pink flabby bit underneath is getting fatter, and it winds me up no end.
Evidently I can no longer survive on a diet of Coca-Cola and cheap pizza without inflating into some sort of behemoth. I have a friend who's grown a beard; not the whispy bits of designer stubble you see on people younger and more attractive than yourself going into younger and more attractive nightclubs, but a full sailor-esque beard. Just being able to grow one should be an indication that you've officially stopped being young. My house at New Year's was not filled with flirting, alcopops and rap music, but with the fat, bald and bearded, listening to Led bloody Zeppelin. We're all at it, and the holiday season just beats you in the face with it until you're sick of the sight of yourself. No wonder more people kill themselves at New Year than any other time of year; they, as the very rock-and-roll adage goes, just want to leave a pretty corpse. But can it really be all that bad? Obviously if it wasn't for the wonders of modern medicine and the death of all the sabre-toothed tigers in south-east England we'd all be dead husks by now, but we're far from decrepit, surely? We're all still of the age where we can walk into my usual sort of club with our heads held high - I saw a bloke who must have been at least 70 in there once, and the DJ has to be at least 40, even if he does have a fashionable haircut.
Contrary to popular opinion, the problem doesn't lie with being old. It, despite what the nostalgia-filled yearly repeats of Calendar Girls might tell you, doesn't lie with being young either. It lies with not being one nor the other; with being the sort of person that desperately tries to cling to their youth while it runs mockingly fast in the other direction and you're still stuck on the express ride to urinary incontinence. My friend with the unfortunate hair dysfunction is constantly assaulting his scalp with new French shampoos and snake-oil miracle cures, clearly utterly petrified that baldness equals oldness equals a group of large men kidnapping you and leaving you to die on an ice floe.Patrick Stewart was long considered a sex symbol with his bald head, and back in the early Paleozoic era when he had hair he looked bloody stupid with it, so it can clearly be gotten away with if you do it gracefully, and can even improve things if done right. The idea of Father Time as a terrible lurching zombie bent on claiming your eternal soul can clearly be overcome.
It's certainly not just people around my age - I spent time with my mother over the holiday period, as you do, and discovered she's at it as well - she's not been covering up a bald spot all these years or anything, but she will persist in trying, however vainly, to keep up with what the television tells her is fashionable; she likes Pussycat Dolls and The Ting Tings, even if she couldn't pick them out of a lineup, eats chicken tikka massala, despite an open and quite vicious distrust of Indians, and is forever trying to get her boyfriend to start wearing eyeliner because that's what fashionable boys do now, never mind just how rediculous black eyeliner would look on a bewildered Irishman lost somewhere in his mid-60s. If I was her I wouldn't be desperately trying to understand the reasoning behind Fall Out Boy, I'd be crawling to the government asking for money because I'd lost the use of my legs, not beacuse I had, but because I could probably get away with it. I'm of the age now where I still feel I should be doing something with myself, or learning all the words to a song by someone called Lil' Wayne. As old as I am, and certainly as old as I feel, I'd love to be of an age where I no longer felt guilty and could sit down with a cup of tea with total and absolute impunity.
Actually, that's pretty much what I do spend my evenings doing, and it's fantastic. If you're going bald, it's just less ridiculous hairstyles to keep up with. If you're getting fat, you can finally eat whatever you fancy; you can have that extra-large kebab, or the steak and chips in the pub - you're only going to get slightly more fat than you already were, and it's not like anyone's going to notice or care unless you start pounding down fistfuls of lard in front of the children. And you can finally admit that, deep down, the greatest piece of music ever recorded is probably The Wall. And your friends will all agree with you, because they're all growing old disgracefully as well.
Bollocks to being young.
Nothing, however, can make you feel older than looking at the state of your closest friends; unless you're Peter Stringfellow, your closest friends are all likely around the same age and probably, predominantly, the same gender, and as hard as it is to see yourself as anything other than the strutting rock God you probably thought you were at seventeen, it's all too easy to notice age creeping up on those closest to you, and somewhere in the deepest reaches of your addled psyche, you know that it's getting to you as well. I have a friend who started going bald in his teens, and for years his retorts to my adolescent jibes have been parried by a simple toss of my thick and lustrous head of hair, but I know that, as I race headlong towards my fifties, which come every New Year feels, and indeed is, that one vast step closer, I'm going to start losing mine as well. My grandfather did, his father did, and his father did, and, as genetics has so cruelly predetermined, so will I. I will also widen, shorten and get angrier, I know this, because the signs are already there; while I'm still the proud owner of a perfectly luxuriant mop of hair, the pink flabby bit underneath is getting fatter, and it winds me up no end.
Evidently I can no longer survive on a diet of Coca-Cola and cheap pizza without inflating into some sort of behemoth. I have a friend who's grown a beard; not the whispy bits of designer stubble you see on people younger and more attractive than yourself going into younger and more attractive nightclubs, but a full sailor-esque beard. Just being able to grow one should be an indication that you've officially stopped being young. My house at New Year's was not filled with flirting, alcopops and rap music, but with the fat, bald and bearded, listening to Led bloody Zeppelin. We're all at it, and the holiday season just beats you in the face with it until you're sick of the sight of yourself. No wonder more people kill themselves at New Year than any other time of year; they, as the very rock-and-roll adage goes, just want to leave a pretty corpse. But can it really be all that bad? Obviously if it wasn't for the wonders of modern medicine and the death of all the sabre-toothed tigers in south-east England we'd all be dead husks by now, but we're far from decrepit, surely? We're all still of the age where we can walk into my usual sort of club with our heads held high - I saw a bloke who must have been at least 70 in there once, and the DJ has to be at least 40, even if he does have a fashionable haircut.
Contrary to popular opinion, the problem doesn't lie with being old. It, despite what the nostalgia-filled yearly repeats of Calendar Girls might tell you, doesn't lie with being young either. It lies with not being one nor the other; with being the sort of person that desperately tries to cling to their youth while it runs mockingly fast in the other direction and you're still stuck on the express ride to urinary incontinence. My friend with the unfortunate hair dysfunction is constantly assaulting his scalp with new French shampoos and snake-oil miracle cures, clearly utterly petrified that baldness equals oldness equals a group of large men kidnapping you and leaving you to die on an ice floe.Patrick Stewart was long considered a sex symbol with his bald head, and back in the early Paleozoic era when he had hair he looked bloody stupid with it, so it can clearly be gotten away with if you do it gracefully, and can even improve things if done right. The idea of Father Time as a terrible lurching zombie bent on claiming your eternal soul can clearly be overcome.
It's certainly not just people around my age - I spent time with my mother over the holiday period, as you do, and discovered she's at it as well - she's not been covering up a bald spot all these years or anything, but she will persist in trying, however vainly, to keep up with what the television tells her is fashionable; she likes Pussycat Dolls and The Ting Tings, even if she couldn't pick them out of a lineup, eats chicken tikka massala, despite an open and quite vicious distrust of Indians, and is forever trying to get her boyfriend to start wearing eyeliner because that's what fashionable boys do now, never mind just how rediculous black eyeliner would look on a bewildered Irishman lost somewhere in his mid-60s. If I was her I wouldn't be desperately trying to understand the reasoning behind Fall Out Boy, I'd be crawling to the government asking for money because I'd lost the use of my legs, not beacuse I had, but because I could probably get away with it. I'm of the age now where I still feel I should be doing something with myself, or learning all the words to a song by someone called Lil' Wayne. As old as I am, and certainly as old as I feel, I'd love to be of an age where I no longer felt guilty and could sit down with a cup of tea with total and absolute impunity.
Actually, that's pretty much what I do spend my evenings doing, and it's fantastic. If you're going bald, it's just less ridiculous hairstyles to keep up with. If you're getting fat, you can finally eat whatever you fancy; you can have that extra-large kebab, or the steak and chips in the pub - you're only going to get slightly more fat than you already were, and it's not like anyone's going to notice or care unless you start pounding down fistfuls of lard in front of the children. And you can finally admit that, deep down, the greatest piece of music ever recorded is probably The Wall. And your friends will all agree with you, because they're all growing old disgracefully as well.
Bollocks to being young.
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