Age has relegated me to the sidelines. At least it’s an escape from all the rushing
Thus old Lord Capulet and a relative of similar vintage wheeze to a halt as the ball reels on and poor, doomed Romeo and Juliet share their first kiss. As ever, 400 years after his death, shakespeare has something to say about what ails thee – or, in this instance, me.
The passing of my dancing days (though even as a lithe teen I took to the dancefloor like an arthritic pig to ice), the progression to a more sedate phase of life, the inescapable yet unacceptable fact that I am no longer young or am entitled to consider myself so, have all been occupying my thoughts recently.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, my eldest daughter, my own little Juliet, has acquired her first boyfriend. This has felt like something of a headbutt from the future, the foreshadowing of that moment when I will be permanently excluded from my rightful role of central male and offered the new post of tedious if tolerated court jester. My surface nonchalance, dear Romeo, hides an internal rictus of horror.
second, and worse, I have come to understand that, due to wear, tear and a dicky ankle, I will never again play five-a-side football. My wife would point out that I have not in fact played – or exercised in any form – for years, and have the love handles to prove it, but there is a significant difference between not having played and the trauma of realising that you are actually done for good.
This has been like an unmanning; evidence of the universe’s cold mockery; a great shove towards the grave.
It was when I was out walking with my friend Paul recently that I suddenly knew my footballing days were over. We were talking about the various contraptions you can buy to protect your wonky knee or your dodgy ligaments when, with sudden dreadful clarity, I realised I would never need anything like that again. I confessed as much and the conversation moved on to the process of ageing and its physical and psychological consequences.
Paul and I have been best pals for 30 years and, to be clear, though we are no longer young, neither are we old. We are 42, which is a bit like occupying the waiting room between feckless boy and old git, a sort of chrysalis from which you can only emerge as a shrunken geriatric who writes angry letters to newspapers and shouts at the telly. You have slowed down, you are more physically limited, you notice that girls in the street no longer notice you, even if you still notice them.
Invisibility
It is an age at which you are dealt a thousand unintentional insults, where you must learn to accept sudden invisibility and irrelevance. You become aware that you don’t have forever – that you won’t have time to read all the books on your shelves; that you’ll never be rich or famous or own a decent car; that you are by now pretty much all you’re going to be. It takes a bit of getting used to.
But there are consolations, too, we agreed. There is a welcome softening of the consuming ambition of youth, that slightly desperate sense that you must climb as high and as far as you can as quickly as you can because that is how things are done. There is a settling-in that takes place, an acceptance of one’s strengths and weaknesses, a widening and enrichment of priorities, a pleasure in being a nobody coupled with a degree of pity towards those who must live as a somebody. The wellbeing of your children matters more to you than anything – certainly more than your own. There is a sort of burgeoning selflessness built into the process that I suspect helps keep us sane. And there is comfort in doing it together.
If there is a unique challenge facing my generation as it ages then it is one adroitly set out in a new book, The Great Acceleration – how the World is Getting Faster, Faster, by Robert Colvile. The author traces how, thanks to the extraordinary impact of the technological revolution, we live and will continue to live in a world of rapid and permanent change.
From the electronic devices in our pockets to the financial markets, from politics to the workplace to culture, new trends, ideas and crises come and go in the blink of an eye.
Just as you are mastering one new piece of tech or understanding one new idea it is pushed into obsolescence by some usurper, which in turn is replaced by another. As Colvile writes: ‘Acceleration is so baked into the system that it will take an almighty alteration not just to our surroundings, but to our very biology, to deal it a serious blow. Even if the West were to retreat from haste and hustle, it is too late – the virus has escaped from its laboratory and infected the rest of the world with a desire to consume, innovate and disrupt.’
Research has shown that by our mid-30s, and certainly by our 40s, we lose our taste for the new, whether music, food or whatever. The clear implication is that in a society of relentless innovation and forward movement, a gap could open up between the well-adapted young and the ill-adapted rest – between the digital natives and those, like my generation, for whom each technological skill is learned only through hard graft. The future could easily escape from our grasp.
As Colvile poignantly points out, Professor Martin Rees, the former AstronomerRoyal, has set up a new institute at Cambridge university called the Centre for the study of Existential Risk, to monitor advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
All of which sounds a bit gloomy, I know. But then the Bard, that most inspired of men, had his gloomy spells too. Who can forget the moment he admitted his five-aside days were over? Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more:
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
A HALL, a hall, give room! And foot it, girls! More light, you knaves, and turn the tables up; And quench the fire, the room is grown too hot. Ah, sirrah, this unlook’d-for sport comes well. Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet, For you and I are past our dancing days. How long is’t now since last yourself and I Were in a mask?’