We were on a family walk in the countryside and I decided to grab a selfie with my daughter. She asked to see the photograph. “You look really old,” she said. I looked at the photograph, studied the man next to the young girl and grudgingly concluded that she was not wrong. “That’s because I’m middle-aged,” I said with more than a hint of defensiveness. “You’re not middle-aged, dad,” my daughter said, and for a moment my heart filled with love and gratitude. “You mean that?” I said. “You’re not middle-aged,” she continued, “you’re upper-aged.”
I can’t tell you what I thought of old people when I was young because I am not sure I thought about them at all. In my teens and twenties, I treated older people almost as if they were part of another species, citizens of another land with different habits and rituals. It was not a country to which I wished to belong. I liked being young and feared being old. I liked to surround myself with friends younger than me in the hope, if not the expectation, that their youth might somehow rub off on me. It worked, for a while.
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around,” remarked Mark Twain, “but when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Lately I have had a similar revelation about age and ageing. Now that I am in my early 50s — an age which the younger me would have been convinced qualified me as old — I have realised that no one actually thinks they are old. I certainly don’t. I only refer to myself as middle-aged as a bleak joke, unsure if the joke is really on me.
Old is always around 10 years older than whatever age one is. By that reckoning, Madonna — who announced a world tour this week — would, at 64, be considered old but I suspect that is not quite how she sees herself. Jarvis Cocker and Brad Pitt will both be 60 this year but I find it hard to think of either of them as old.
The other great revelation I have had about age is that I have finally discovered the secret to feeling young. It has nothing to do with intermittent fasting or high-intensity training and no surgical procedures are required.
The secret to feeling young is to spend time with people who are older than you. It really works: in theory the idea of being 60 will fill me with unrelenting terror until I spend time with my friend Kath, who is 61, as vivacious and curious about life as she has ever been, and suddenly 60 doesn’t seem so bad.
I can’t imagine 70 being anything other than utterly awful, in theory, but then I catch up with my brilliant friend Laurie, who is 70, and that number no longer feels terrifying.
Young people, noted Henry James Bryon, sow wild oats while the old grow sage. I love my children but spending any time with them makes me feel old; it is only when I am around older people that I feel most young.
Kureishi battles against the odds
It is the stuff of horror.
You are on holiday in Rome with your wife when you suddenly collapse, fall awkwardly, twisting your spine. In an instant life is forever changed. That is what happened to the writer Hanif Kureishi just after Christmas.
Kureishi is someone who I admire greatly and know a little — his works such as My Beautiful Launderette and The Buddha of Suburbia were revolutionary and revelatory. Since his accident Kureishi had been dictating daily dispatches from his bed. He shares it via Twitter and it is utterly compelling — we feel as if we are at his bedside eavesdropping on his anger, confusion, guilt and curiosity.
It is a story unfolding in real time so neither Kureishi nor his readers know how it will end. What we do know is that Kureishi has shown that it takes more than a fall to keep a mighty writer down.
