50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

There was a ‘thing’ on Twitter recently, which involved posting a picture of your 20-year-old self. Or as near to your 20-year-old self as you could get, with photographic evidence of the way you were.

It was assumed that those participating were now in their 30s, 40s, or even older — there wouldn’t be much point in 25-year-olds showing us nostalgic images of their 20-year-old selves.

The experiment was best described by the writer Kit de Waal, who summarised the range of images thus: “The beauty, the skin, the eyes, the figures, never mind the beauty inside. And yet if you’d asked us then, what would we have said? How hard we are on ourselves...”

How true this is — and how common it must be for people to discover some photo of themselves when they were young, and to wonder why they had such a poor opinion of themselves at the time.

Age brings this kind of objectivity, whereas when we are actually 20, we are also going by the opinions of other people about our value or our lack of value — or at least by our perception of the opinions of other people, which we usually assume to be more critical than they are.

And in these years when we have no idea of what we really look like, or how good we are, we are likely to look to the most ancient sources for a cure for that lack of self-esteem.

We drink just to help us to walk into a room, we who have nothing wrong with us at all, but who will only realise this in about 30 years’ time.

We develop anxieties which we try to treat with the worst kinds of medication, the kinds that create their own anxieties, on top of the ones that are already blinding us to the reality of how we are in the world.

Yes, how hard we are on ourselves. Most of us, that is. Not Mr Rod Stewart.

I refer not to the famous strutting images of Rod in his years of superstardom, but to the Rod who first appeared in a very old documentary, probably on the BBC, in which we saw the young Rod Stewart in the days of black-and-white TV.

Young Rod was living above the tobacconist’s shop in London that was run by his father, and he was starting to make a name for himself as a singer

— not a very big name, really, just a name. Somebody else’s name, really, Long John Baldry being the leader of his band.

Yet as I watched this old film — even knowing Rod as we knew him eventually — there was something that struck me with great force. I felt that he was probably the most self-confident person I have ever seen. There was nothing over-the-top about it, no bragging as such, there was just this total absence of doubt.

Nor did his talents at the time seem extravagant — Rod had been a decent enough footballer, but not exactly world class, and he was just starting out

“We have nothing wrong with us, but we will only realise this in about 30 years’ time”

in the music business.

Moreover, he had failed his 11-plus exam, which might have led a less-secure individual to worry somewhat about his prospects in life, but which apparently did not in any way impinge on Rod’s “fantastically happy” childhood.

Consider too, the fact that Rod has that raspy voice, which would have deterred the average man from thinking of himself as a professional singer — certainly in the years when Rod was growing up, a singer needed to be smoother in his delivery.

Bur Rod sailed through all that, because somehow he knew who he was, and how good he was.

Again, I don’t mean that he was an egomaniac; he just had that amazingly rare ability to make an accurate assessment of himself.

But then we all have that ability… looking back.