The New Thirty

My contemporaries are one by one celebrating their three score years and ten. “Happy Birthday” to all of them. 

(3 x 20) + 10 = x 

Algebra was never my strong point, but since some of these individuals spend half their time going on and on about things that happened in their teens and early twenties, I can only calculate  that “x” is The New Thirty. And as they are my contemporaries, an elementary deduction tells me that age-wise I must be somewhere in the same territory. As indeed I am, similarly obsessed with the wonderfully named hump of reminiscence and having today entered the month in which I will, all things being equal, reach another decade in which to decay. X marks the spot.

Given that looming biblical endpoint, not to mention the coronavirus-linked heightened emphasis on mortality we’ve been force fed in recent months, plus the recent shocking deaths of several friends and relatives, it’s hard not to have a few gloomy thoughts. It’s a dangerous age, and a more dangerous world than at any time in the last half century or so. Although as thoughts about one’s own mortality are impossible to focus or to face in any convincingly sincere emotional manner, one displaces sideways all the potential unpleasantries implied. Instead one tries to make a few necessary preparations, half-hearted attempts at putting one’s house in order in preparation for the long journey ahead, that trip whose departure date remains mercifully unknown, the ultimate magical mystery tour that is waiting to take us all away. Otherwise one carries on, as always, on the assumption of personal immortality, cheered on by televised images of enviable longevity. Look at Sir Tom, and what he’s been doing around his centenary; look at that lady who just turned 107. Surely nothing to be alarmed about for a long time to come …

Not that I’m going to announce my retirement plans here because I have a sneaking suspicion that from time to time God – when He’s sufficiently bored with logging all the tiresomely predictable misdemeanours of His ungrateful creations and is feeling desperately in need of a change of activity - reads my blog. And yes, He does have a bit of a reputation for not liking to be taken for granted. What I’m going to do therefore is to be thankfully reminiscent (and not in any humpy kind of way), to be tremendously grateful for what I’ve had so far, having lived through such a wonderful period of history, and to say nice things.

A lifetime spanning 1950 to 2020 and spent mostly in the UK was not a bad hand to have been dealt, bar a few hiccups. Perhaps if I’d been given an earlier invitation to the celestial timetabling department I might have put in for an emergence event sometime around 1930; that way I could have enjoyed the Second World War without any risk of having to fight in it, I could have been there at the proper start of rock’n’roll, and I could have quietly shuffled off, content with the state of the world, before this present century became as distinctly unpleasant as it very soon proved itself to be. I might even have opted to be French or American. I regret missing WW2 and not being old enough to properly enjoy its immediate aftermath, but that’s a small price to pay for being at my most impressionable during the 1960s and for coinciding with the best music ever in the history of everything. Becoming a teenager in England in 1963 was pretty much hitting the bullseye.

I’ve had a lucky choice of family – parents and grandparents, wife, children, and others – who have all been lovely, kind, sensitive, and caring, and in many instances tremendously talented. Over this seventy year period I’ve enjoyed the benefits of inhabiting a moderately adequate body, of being inhabited by an occasionally adequate mind, and of long term freedom from major defects and diseases. I’ve lived through – from a British perspective – mostly peaceful times. It’s always nice to think – especially when considering the lives of your children - that you’re leaving behind a world better than the one you arrived in; until around twenty years ago I did think this.

Perhaps what I feel luckiest about is that my lifespan straddled the great digital divide, roughly speaking coincident with the turn of the millennium. I refer to that irreversible transition which separates everything of an informational character that went before, namely the analogue era, a kind of dark ages since the beginning of time (a very long time ago), and the digital era that will last forever (probably quite soon, the way things are looking). That period of crossover with which I coincided fairly exactly made for a very interesting life for someone with my sort of appetites. I can’t imagine the future is going to be anything like as rewarding for those who like variety and for things to be interesting. The story of a process of evolution for a promisingly stroppy two-legged species of hunter-gatherer that ends with a small oblong virtual box labelled “search” – or one of its functional equivalents : “Alexa, wipe my bum” - is always going to be something of a let-down. From sapiens to zapiens to - can’t be arsed? Is that it, then? Is that the final destination for the human race?

Sure enough, though, back in the day, computers – along with a hovercraft in every domestic garage, pill sized meals, noötropic cognitive enhancers, personal jetpacks, holidays on Titan, an 8 hour week and retirement at 35 – were the future. Conspicuously it’s not the kind of future like what we witness today. Lockdown has in some respects been a blessing for someone like me; there’s much about today’s world that I haven’t missed at all. Likewise, when the time comes …

What I shall be missing though, in the very near future, is a proper celebration on the big day, thanks to social distancing requirements. So instead, I’ll look forward to having a “proper do” when safer times return. Then, God willing, I’ll start enjoying my own “New Thirties”.