Ageing Really Sucks

The Secret Scribbler wants to get getting older off his chest, literally

AS THE NURSE pulled out a razor, I suddenly realised I’d never been shaved by another human being. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d gone almost 44 years without being shaved, waxed or lasered by anyone else.

It was the first unwanted sign of the wretched ageing process.

A nurse half my age had to remove my chest hair to stick a heart monitor on a smooth spot. This was a disconcerting experience for a few reasons. First, the area around my left nipple had acquired a disturbing, hitherto unknown, amount of grey hair.

While the nurse went to work with the razor, I had no choice but to look down. Remember the grey, wild-haired Doc Brown from the Back to the Future movies? I had mini-me versions of Doc Brown on both sides of my chest.

By the time the nurse was done, she had removed all the hair from my left chest plate, along with the final tufts of my dignity.

On mammals, hair provides all sorts of defensive functions. On middle-aged men, it hides manboobs. I didn’t know this until one of mine revealed itself for the first time in the cardiologist’s office.

Stripped of its hairy coat, my man-boob was so depressing in its droopiness, it might as well have had my date of birth stamped across it.

Man-boobs are not generally a sign of fitness, but age. Young, unfit men are not usually cursed with such anatomical oddities, whereas older, fitter men can still be afflicted with the wobbly bits. They are unexpected, unwelcome bits that grow over time, month on month, year on year, like a bank overdraft.

In that moment, I appreciated the value of chest and head hair. They are the only parts of the upper body where hair is actually embraced as the decades pass. Everyone already knows about the problems with nasal hair. On the Monopoly board of life, no one can pass “go” and approach a midlife crisis without first collecting 200 nasal hairs.

But no one mentions the ears. It’s not enough that the fleshy organs actually grow over time, turning into the kind of cartoonish appendages usually found on the BFG. No, they also grow hairs, too, leaving men in their forties with ears that look like sprouted potatoes.

When parents explained puberty, they focused on the sexier elements of the changing male body. Chests swelled. Facial hair appeared. Voices and testicles dropped (though not always at the same time, which could be awkward).

But no one mentioned those awkward hours spent in front of a bathroom mirror, tilting one’s head to reach stray hairs around the earlobe. When we started dating, I’m sure my future wife never expected to hear me say: “Yes, you can order the taxi. I’ve just got to trim one more earlobe hair. It’s a grey little bugger so it’s hard to spot.”

She’s already fed-up with me droning on about the ageing process and the effect it has on mind and memory.

Psychologists have long tried to explain why time seems to go by faster as we get older. Perspective is one popular theory. For a baby, 12 months is 100 percent of his life. For an 18-year-old, a year is just under six percent of his life, so it seems to pass quicker, which makes sense.

For me, a year seems to have passed by lunchtime. As a result, I am constantly making pointless comparisons between the past and present.

“Do you know that the time between now and when we first met,” I say, “is greater than the time between when we first met and The Beatles conquering America?”

To which, my wife replies: “Do you know the time between now and us getting divorced gets closer whenever you make one of your stupid time comparisons?”

But there’s no escaping the obsession. The quirks and foibles of the sneaky ageing process are omnipresent. Once that heart monitor had measured enough beats per minute through my hairless chest, the cardiologist cheerfully pointed out that the minor health issue was not uncommon among “men of your age”.

So a hospital trip had underlined my advancing years, removed my chest hair, revealed a man-boob, and emptied my wallet so quickly that the women on reception should’ve worn balaclavas and waved guns in the air.

I need to be stoic, rational and mature about getting older. Most of all, I need my chest hair back.