The day before my twenty-first birthday, after morning
lectures, I took a train into Paddington, accompanied by Juan, my Venezuelan neighbour
who was going to Hammersmith Hospital for a consultation about the painful rheumatism
affecting his hands. On arrival in London, he bought me a coffee and went on
his way. I crossed to Fenchurch Street, and bought a day return to Shoeburyness
(80 pence). While on the journey I read some of Solzhenitsyn’s “One day in the
life of Ivan Denisovich”. The Thames estuary came into sight, one of my
favourite bits of coastline, so I put the book away and before long arrived at
the end of the line.
Armed with OS map Number 162, “Southend-on-Sea”, one inch to the mile, published 1957, price
seven shillings and sixpence, cloth-backed, total imperial luxury, I headed
north from Shoeburyness station. I took the road towards Foulness, for I had
spotted on the map a waterway called New England Creek, and had formed the idea
that beyond it was a small area that might – or should - be called New England
Island. For my milestone birthday, into adulthood, I thought that would be somewhere
suitably symbolic to visit, even if it was only a patch of Essex mud. A New
England, a fresh start. I walked out of Shoeburyness and through places with
odd corners and malign-looking inhabitants. Through Great Wakering and Samuel’s
Corner. Off to the right, the North Sea and the fabled Maplin Sands, already
being considered for London’s third airport and, under the soubriquet of Boris
Island, wittered about - still runway-less - to this day.
I reached a barrier across the road; a military checkpoint.
“And where are we going today, laddie?” “Er, towards Foulness”. At that precise
moment, some distance ahead, came the loud crump of munitions. Perfect timing.
“I don’t think so, squire. We’re in the middle of training”.
Welcome to adult life. I smartly about-turned and headed
back, past the malignant corners and the odd inhabitants, and caught the next
train out.
Later, in the evening sunshine on Primrose Hill, which I’d
never visited before, I sat near the summit admiring the view towards the
recently constructed Snowdon Aviary, Centre Point and the Post Office Tower, symbols
of the decade just passed, and composed a sort of manifesto about coming of age
– what I had done, where I had got to, where I wanted to go. Then I walked down
across the park and returned to base. Mercifully, the manifesto soon disappeared.
Now it’s the eve of another milestone birthday. No more
manifestos, but something more like an article of surrender. Now isn’t the time
to be having a midlife crisis, so I shan’t be investing in a Harley-Davidson or
a red Ferrari, parachuting onto the summit of the Matterhorn or walking to the
South Pole, starting a new family with a Polynesian pole-dancer or having the
operation so I can enter a convent. Now is not the time to be jumping out of my
comfort zone, although I might gingerly explore its blurred edges. I might, for
instance, consider a new pair of slippers, try to remember a few more words of
Welsh like you see on bilingual roadsigns, become a more pro-active gardener,
or listen to more Elgar than is strictly necessary. At The New Thirty (see blog
posting for 1st June), while one should not rule out new activities - absolutely
not - I feel that one should start to behave largely within the perimeters and
parameters of expectation, not out of consideration for others, but for
oneself, because one has accepted what one is. Circumstances of birth,
parentage, location, education, time in history, the accidents and coincidences
of life and opportunity, have made one what one is essentially always going to
be. Now is the time to get on with it.
There are boundaries, limitations, preferred territories
which it is absurd to try and deny or disrespect, and it is largely within these
constraints that henceforward one will operate. This, basically, is it, this is all there is, all there is
ever going to be.
Input will surely affect output. One will begin to ransack
the past for things to say in order to try and communicate, in an ongoing act
of autophagy, of eating oneself, of draining the swamps of fickle memory. A
meaty forearm here, a juicy earlobe there, a tasty buttock somewhere else; when
you get to my age you have to bite what you can reach. This tendency for
devouring oneself is no doubt augmented by the current viral pandemic, by the
restraints imposed by lockdown, and in my own case by this entirely unnecessary
habit of blogging. Perhaps I should keep stumm.
As one grows older, if one is fortunate to age in reasonable
health, one can expect that the tendency towards self-consumption will become
more pronounced, until most of the substance has been used up and one has
reduced to a skeleton of core fixations, into an etiolated being boring others
to death with the same old pointless and increasingly disjointed, mangled,
predictable anecdotes and derailed trains of thought. Ultimately, a time will
come when even these cannot be accessed, even via the most tortuous routes of
mental association and by the well-rehearsed promptings of one’s kind and
patient relatives. And then what happens? What is left? Is what is left what
one truly is, what one has been all along, no longer worried by detail or
meaningfulness or relevance, no longer clothed in the flatteries of language
and productive life? What then?
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