My birthday
fell during the past week and, as it happened, I spent the day alone: no fuss,
no disruption to my routines and no public outing of my antiquity. There were
cards, of course - a disturbingly high proportion of which featured bottles of
red wine - and there were Facebook messages, but otherwise my head was
comfortingly in the sand.
But there is
no denying the passage of time. At my gym, for instance, although they have now
disabled the gismo that used to play “Happy birthday to you…” when you swiped your
membership card, there is another, inescapable reminder: the monitoring matrix on
the cross-trainer which requires you to enter your age. However, I entered the
wrong number out of habit and went on to record a PB (personal best) of 127
heartbeats per minute while watching Sean Connery wreak havoc in SPECTRE’s
secret bunker, during which time the screen flashed a warning that my heart
rate was too high - which was troubling since it thought I was younger than I
was.
The inevitable
process of ageing and its periodic reminders bring to mind a question posed by
one of our revered female literary figures - “What are old men for?” I am
working tirelessly to dislodge its implied assumption of uselessness but my
recent activities seem only to aggregate the evidence for her case.
At the
suggestion of a friend I joined a jazz appreciation society. At my first meeting
I was unsure of what to expect but, realising that I was in a room full of men
whose demographic profile exactly matched my own and that the retrospective
nature of proceedings was set firmly in the past tense, I doubt whether there
is much scope for any proselytising aimed at a younger audience. Days later,
when that same friend and I met in town for a beer, I recognised another
generational challenge: the first bar we went into was evidently a young
peoples’ venue where the beer offering was completely alien to us. We politely excused
ourselves and found a “traditional” pub nearby where we hoped to feel more at
home. The beer was fine but the fact that we were the only customers in the
place undermined our enjoyment by making us feel like the last survivors of our
species.
Some days
later, at the suggestion of another friend, I attended the Ultimate Rhythm & Blues concert which featured Spencer Davis
and Maggie Bell plus The Zombies, The Animals and The Yardbirds. I went, I
suppose, more from incredulity than conviction: surely these dinosaurs had died
out long ago? And, sure enough, only remnants of the bands advertised were
actually playing. The gaps in the original line-ups had been filled with
talented young surrogates who had mastered all the notes, but it was the
old-timers who were in charge of re-creating the magic of the sixties. Some of
them, Maggie Bell especially, performed impressively but they were ultimately
trading on nostalgia and, for me at least, the excitement of that first
encounter could not be replicated. Not that nostalgia and harking back to the
past should be dismissed as sentimental nonsense: as the years go by they are an
inevitable consequence of having more stuff to hark back to.
Meanwhile, keeping
abreast of current events, I noticed that Facebook just gave a couple of blokes
$19 billion for some software called WhatsApp. I downloaded it to my phone so I
could join in the fun but am struggling to find anyone in my address book,
apart from my brother, who is similarly poised on the leading edge of hip
communications media.
Hey old fella !!! Whatsapp is the way to go !! your getting older sister has joined the flow.
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