I will turn 70 in less than 2 months time, which feels to me like quite a big milestone. I’m old enough that people sometimes give up their seat to me. The other day a woman in her thirties or forties even offered to help me carry my case, which was kindly meant no doubt, but not at all pleasing to me. I can still carry a fucking suitcase thank you very much!
Old people often say that they don’t feel old, by which, I take it, we don’t mean that we are unaware of the physical changes taking place inside us – people my age talk about their health a lot – but that the spirit that looks out of our eyes feels like the same spirit it always has been.
I don’t see how we can know this is true, actually, since our memories of being young are filtered through our consciousness as it now exists -maybe it’s only in retrospect that being young isn’t so different from being old? – but anyway, that’s how it feels. Perhaps what we really mean is that, when we were young, old people seemed to us to be a very different kind of being, driven by entirely different needs, but now we are old we see that our needs are essentially the same: love, sex, comfort, stimulation, the esteem of others, a sense of purpose… etc etc
I’m less driven though. Retirement, a pension, society’s expectations of older people – all of these things make it much easier for me to do nothing in particular without feeling bad about it. I hope I have some more books in me, but it doesn’t matter to me so much as it once did. I had an ambition to be a writer when I was young and I am very proud of having achieved it – proud and relieved, because writing, more than almost anything else, has given me a sense of being someone, which I completely lacked as a young man – but I feel I have achieved it and writing now is simply something I like doing.
And I am more interested just in the experience of being alive. I can’t be bothered with bucket lists and cycling up Mount Kilimanjaro and so on – to be frank that all seems a bit desperate to me – but I can happily spend whole mornings just thinking and dreaming. Thus, for instance, I travel on trains frequently but where once I might have used the time to read books or write, what I mostly do these days is listen to music and think or, if the opportunity presents itself, get into a conversation with other travellers. I do love talking with people I meet by chance.
I had the protagonist of my novel Tomorrow say that, if you had the choice between telling a story and being a character in a story, then being a character was the way to go, and I feel that more and more. I guess this is partly because society doesn’t expect me to be productive any more (how great is that!) and partly because I’m conscious that the story of me is now in its third and final act.
I listen to music a lot. As I’ve observed before, I actually think that’s part of the ‘being a character in the story’ thing. A few generations ago, no one would think that listening to music was a thing you did while travelling from A to B, but films and TV have trained us to think of characters in stories having music in the background and, beginning with radios in cars, technology has made this a possibility for all of us, and not just a privilege reserved for fictional beings. I like intense, emotional music, but I’m particularly fond these days of Cuban jazz – sharp, cool, instrumental music with a salsa-esque rhythm – because it makes me want to dance. (If you have Spotify, try keeping still while listening to this.)
I do dance when I get a chance – it’s another way of being a character in a story, I suppose – and will even do a few discreet steps as I wait on station platforms for the trains that take me to my beautiful grandchildren.
At some point, most likely in well under twenty years, I’ll be dead. I’m fine with that, but I’m not looking forward to the decrepit bit that usually comes first.
