Ageless

I bumped into a very old friend in town today. We first met at baby classes thirty two years ago when I was with my first wife, expecting our first child, and she was a single mother who was attending classes with her ex-husband who was also the father of the child she was expecting. Some members of our National Childbirth Trust group found this a little difficult, as there were a lot of very conventional Surrey Christian couples in the room. JR (as I shall call her) was however feisty and unapologetic, which is pretty much how she remains today.

We compared notes on ageing and how impossible it was that we were both in our sixties and (even more incredibly) had children in their ‘thirties. We never thought we would get old, or rather our brains could not conceptualise it. I think we may both still be in a state of denial along with many other members of our generation, who in my experience seem evenly split along the lines of radical old woke versus brexit voting Daily Mail readers.

On which topic, TSM came down to the kitchen at 7.30 this morning to find me toe tapping to The Rolling Stones. “In all our twenty eight years together I have never known you to listen to The Stones” she said. “What’s going on?”. This was not a question I could easily answer but I suspect I was already, early in the day, channelling Mick Jagger and trying to emulate his Faustian agelessness. But there is an interesting point here. If you Google how the great icon of rock’n’roll manages to keep going you find that all the top search hits are articles for The Express, The Daily Mail, The Sun and - seriously - Woman and Home. Clearly politics is less important than staying alive once you get into your seventh (or in his case eighth) decade. Good job it was Pete Townsend of The Who that wrote “Hope I die before I get old”. No one could accuse Mick of that one with his keto diet and strutting exercise routine.

JR and I promised to meet up at some point for coffee on one of her six weekly visits from Wales, where she now lives. Until then I shall do my best to avoid getting older. Or at least admitting to the fact. Truth is, You Can’t Always Get What You Want …