The LEAN and SLIPPERED PANTALOON

Today, May 20th, is Eliza Doolittle Day and, around midday, I shall complete 60 years of independent existence. I told the butcher so yesterday morning when he called me, as he often does, “young man”. “Some of us have already passed beyond that,” he said, without much show of sympathy as he selected the shoulder of lamb. He’s 63. When he returned from out the back with the bones for the dogs, he said “oh, it’s only a number, sir”. Then he gave me a quizzical look. “Mind,” he added, “it’s a big number”.

For years I’ve taken the view that it’s only a number. I remember the sensation, when I turned 33, that I had never thought of being that old. After that, I took it in my stride and was short with friends who groaned about getting older. Hell, the alternative is worse.

But this one seems like a rite of passage. There’s the bus pass, for starters. Not that I’ve actually got my bus pass yet. I thought I’d applied in good time. I asked my favourite woman at the post office for the form and, when she said nothing, I cried “you’re supposed to reel back in shock and amazement”. She came back quick as a flash: “Well, I assumed you were getting it for your mother”. But I forgot to feed into the calculation that I was dealing with the local council. So the paperwork is no doubt mired on some jobsworth’s desk. I expect I will have to pay unnecessarily for a few bus rides before I finally have the priceless pass in my hand.

If were a woman I’d be a pensioner from today. Not long to wait. Five years will zip by if the last 27 or so be any guide. In society’s view, I am formally old. If I am the victim of some crime or public incident, the press will describe me as “an elderly man”. At least I don’t have grandchildren which is just about the most defining fact the press grabs hold of if you’re over a certain age: “Local grandmother wins Lottery jackpot” – you know the kind of thing.

And there’s a sort of expectation about lifestyle that, if you’re not careful, you begin to take on board. I don’t think we’re about to start taking Saga holidays and going to Darby & Joan Clubs (are there still Darby & Joan Clubs?) But take last weekend, for instance. We caught a lunchtime train to London for two 60th birthday parties. One was an informal afternoon-drifting-into-evening drop-in do in a north London garden and living room. The other was a catered affair in the Conservatory at the Barbican Centre, for which the witty invitations were fold-out versions of a bus pass. This was firmly designated as 6.00-8.30pm so that anyone who wanted to would still have evening left in which to go on to something else. We got the train back west and were home soon after 10.00. Now, what sort of people under the age-range of 55-upwards go to two Saturday parties and can still have an early night? Only the religious, probably.

Of course, we are by and large a good advert for our years. When Jack Nicholson turned 60 ten years and a month ago, he said that he was a lot younger than his father had been at 60. I feel the same. In our parents’ generation, there was a vivid fear of being thought “mutton dressed as lamb” but nobody pays that any heed any more. There are “young” clothes, of course, but you really can’t wear those unless you’re 17 and thin as a wand. For the rest of us, we fight against age discrimination while wearing the kinds of clothes we wore in our twenties, dyeing our hair and having “work” done to make our ages more mysterious. There is much less evidence of youth culture now than when we invented it and many of the heroes of our youth are still working and are the heroes of the present young. There was a “generation gap” between us and our parents. Now we’re all Jack and Jill, whatever age we are.

The downside is that it’s downhill. In your 50s, I discovered – because certainly nobody warned me – that the aging process really takes hold. Run for a bus and you’re winded for the whole journey. Work in the garden and you can’t get out of the chair you just sat in for five minutes. Stay up late and you’re nodding off all the next day. Aches and pains become part of the warp and woof of daily life. Recovery from any extra effort takes far longer than when you took most things in your stride.

And if you didn’t have health problems before, they begin at least to threaten to hang about you now. My eyesight has become gradually compromised and it isn’t clear yet whether any surgical procedures will be recommended or even practicable. For someone whose home is bursting with still-to-be-read books and still-to-be-watched videotapes, this is gloomy stuff. And my lifelong disinclination to exercise is coming home to roost in various subterranean and not so subtle ways. I don’t suggest that turning 60 brings unfamiliar intimations of mortality. I never lacked for those. The playwright David Mercer, a largely forgotten figure now, was born 19 years before me and said, when he turned 45, that being that age made him aware of his mortality. At the time, I found that unaccountable for, at 26, I felt well aware that we pass this way only once and then not for long. Mercer died only seven years later, the same year as John Lennon. I hope to savour the full and rich old age that those two giants were cruelly denied.

But there are no guarantees in these matters, whatever age you are. In the late 1970s, a Sunday Times Magazine survey of acting talent picked out one man and one woman tipped to go a long way. They were Richard Beckinsale, who was to die of a heart attack in 1979 at the age of 31, and Susan Littler, who died of cancer in 1982 at 32. So you just have to hope for the best and try to present a moving target. There are no rules about these things. John Gielgud gave his last television interview to a rather probing Jeremy Paxman who wanted to know Sir John’s attitude to death, which Paxman evidently thought a man in his mid-90s should be daily expecting. I wish Sir John had snapped that, unless the interview were saved until after his death, he would certainly see out some of those watching and perhaps, who could guess, even Paxman himself. And of course, as I write in the small hours of May 20th, there is actually no knowing if I will indeed reach the full 60. I could pass in my sleep, still a quinquagenarian.