FORGET BEING YOUNG — I WANTED A LAWNMOWER

Quentin Letts Real age: 55. Spirit age: 56.

ONLY twice have I felt my real age — when I was six, and now I am about to be 56. On both occasions there was a literary connection.

I have a clear memory of staring at the long looking-glass in my mother’s bedroom on February 6, 1969 — my 6th birthday — and thinking: ‘This is the business!’ I was wearing the uniform of a school where I was about to become the youngest pupil and I felt I had escaped kiddiehood.

A.A. Milne’s poem Now We Are Six ends: ‘But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.’ That’s how I felt that day. Over subsequent decades my ‘spirit age’ was mostly far older than my real vintage.

The first LP I bought, aged 12, from the Cirencester branch of FW Woolworth, was Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. As a teenager I ached to wear baggy corduroys and smoke a pipe. I have owned only one pair of jeans and they were not a success.

At university in Ireland I hated the pressure to be ‘with it’ and dated a beautiful Belfast artist who was ten years my senior. As a 30year-old reporter, I envied older journalists who had seen the world and mastered their craft.

When I married Lois in 1996, I knew she was a cracker yet felt itchy when grannies cooed over us as ‘love’s young dream’ and told us: ‘It’s all in front of you.’ I didn’t want to be young. I wanted to be established, successful, my own man, with a lawnmower and a drinks cabinet and shoe-trees. Now I’ve got them and it feels right. In The Idiot, Dostoyevsky writes that 56 is the age at which real life can begin: a ‘fine complexion, sound though discoloured teeth, a stocky, solid figure, a preoccupied air in the morning, a gay face in the evening’.

There is also, though this he omitted, a disposition to pity anyone younger, and a sense of relief to have left behind youth’s gulping gawkishness. Thank heavens for middle age.