I’m celebrating 80 years of having a fine old time

IHAVE just celebrated my 80th birthday and received cards from daughters Sian and Siobhan that read like eulogies. Then I opened a WhatsApp connection of more tributes, collated and edited by Sian, that seemed more suited to a full funeral, and made me wonder if I had died and no one told me.

There were video messages from our oldest friends Barry and Sheila, who Maria and I met on honeymoon in Spain in the 1960s, and wonderfully amusing reminiscences from Richard Donkin, award winning reporter of the Financial Times and author, now living in retirement in Nether Wallop and my best pal in journalism, and Richard “Lord Honley” Marshall, lawyer and honorary Blues Brother, if only for the suits he wears.

Lord Honley had me laughing out loud when he recalled how we held initial prejudices about each other because of my working class background and his public school upbringing. Of course, once we became friends, he said, those prejudices were totally confirmed.

And wait. There’s more: music from Donegal: grandson Lorcan (15) playing a classical piece on the piano, Ruauri (13) following up with jazz, and Sorcha (eight) playing Happy Birthday.

At home in Honley, granddaughter Jeanie (nine) played Happy Birthday on electric keyboards as everyone sang, and Dillon (five) waited for the cake.

By heck, all this fuss for getting … well, I was going to say old but, as my late Auntie Doris once said when in her 90s: “You know, inside I’m 18.” I’m more of a realist. Inside I’m 32.

I never imagined being 80 during those wild Swinging 60s when I wore beads round my neck and an Afghan coat that should have been condemned as a health hazard to nostrils. Didn’t they smell?

Just to think I started in newspapers aged 17 in 1958 and, 63 years later, I’m still a working journalist, after a life of discovery through the hedonistic days of beatniks, jazz and rock and roll, decades of late nights and long flights, strange assignments and writing books to become a multi-millionaire of words.

In between I managed to marry my beautiful wife Antionietta Maria Colulaca (well, she was only 16 when I met her, while I was a world travelled 23) and acquire a wonderful family of two daughters, two son-in-laws as weird as me – one a musician and the other a poet and counsellor – and five grandchildren.

And I have made it to 80. Where did all the years go? Having a bloody good time, that’s where.