On Saturday I may be 65 – but no carriage clock, please

THERE are times in life when you think: how the hell did this happen? I am awake, completely compos mentis – bright as a button, in fact. And I have had my eye on the ball for years and years. Yet this thing has crept up and hit me like a brick…

I apologise for being a little meme-me-ish but, as I write, members of my family, friends, numerous cards through the post and an avalanche of messages on Facebook are all telling me it is my 65th birthday.

That’s a big one for a bloke like me, because for most of my life that was the age when men were chucked on the scrapheap.

The age of retirement changed only recently, so there remains a kind of lurking, haunting fear of this particular birthday.

In times past, reaching 65 must have been like being confronted by one of those banners towed by small planes: “You are old. Go home, put your feet up, take it easy – and prepare for infirmity and death.”

Before outraged old buffers (I can use that term now, as I am one) start writing in, please note that I am talking about an old fashioned impression of the age of three-score-andfive years. Today, many regard it as the start of Middle Age – and I count myself in their number.

However, it is the shock of waking up and counting a personal tally of 23,741 days that I cannot get over. Of course you know it’s coming, but when it eventually arrives you find yourself thinking someone somewhere must have got the sums wrong. I remember my dear old dad saying the same thing…

“How did I get here? It can’t be right! There’s been a mistake. There’s a youngish chap here, trapped in a time machine that’s out of control. How do you stop the blessed thing? I need to get out and walk in my natural habitat – by which I mean the sunlit uplands of youth!”

“You are ’avin’ a larf mate – there ain’t no mistake I knows of…” I hear a rather coarse and unpleasant person snarl in a kind of mock Dickensian accent from somewhere behind my back.

There’s a kind of rasping noise so that when I spin round to see who’s there, I am confronted by the ghostly outline of the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe. This isn’t a birthday it’s a shock to the system.

This column may have touched on the subject before, but when I was a young reporter working for a weekly newspaper I occasionally visited a local paper mill to cover the jointretirement parties which were staged for longstanding members of staff.

These occasions were held on the upper floor of a large corrugated iron building that housed a canteen where the fag-smoking ladies of the kitchens would have prepared a few celebratory cakes and sandwiches.

The managing director – I seem to recall his name was Mr Weedy, or something like that – would come hurriedly in with a bunch of besuited minions at his side and walk down the line of retiring workers shaking hands and having a few words with each before handing over some kind of inscribed clock or barometer. Then he’d make a quick speech before inviting everyone to tuck into the rather lacklustre high-tea – and I would have to get to work, pronto, interviewing each of the 65-year-olds (it was always men) so they could have their moment of fame in the paper.

A foreign country compared to the world we live in now. For a start, a lot of those weary old guys would say: “I’ve worked here man and boy. Started when I was 14.”

The days of a job-for-life are long past.

One of the questions my editor told me I had to ask was what these men planned to do in their retirement.

Gardening or looking after the allotment always came out on top. There were a few pigeon fanciers, and a surprising number wanted to play bowls.

But I never, ever, heard any of those old boys say anything exciting or intriguing about the life ahead of them.

Which was maybe just as well, because in all too many cases it turned out there wasn’t much of a life ahead anyway.

A year or so later, I’d be going through the notices that local funeral directors used to send in to the paper, and there would be the names of the owners of those inscribed clocks and barometers.

Time and again it happened, so that I’d mutter to the attractive young female reporter who sat next to me: “Crikey! That poor old geezer only had 18 months after his escape from those dark satanic mills. A quick growing season in the garden, away from the crushing rollers and deafening machinery, and it’s all over.”

We couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be old.

Thankfully, people tend to live longer nowadays. However, I had a dream last night that Mr Weedy was walking towards me with huge staring eyes in the fatty-fried-fag-smokefug of that creaking wood-floored canteen, holding up a gold watch on a chain.

I was, and remain, hypnotised with fear.

‘It is the shock of waking up and counting a personal tally of 23,741 days I can’t get over’