by Ron Tocknell

Created on: August 19, 2007

As I approach my 60th year with the realisation that, unless I have an above average chance of reaching 120, I can't really call myself "middle aged" any more. I soften this realisation by inventing a new category of age groups: "Early Mature". Anything to postpone the inevitability of having to identify myself as "Old".

Old age really does creep up on you without you noticing. I still feel like a young man. I still enjoy many of the things I enjoyed as a young man and even find myself savouring them more, albeit largely because they TAKE a bit longer. But there are clues, of course: Your friends start looking older, policemen, politicians and doctors start looking younger and it seems that every week there's a TV obituary to one or the other of the Superstars that defined your generation.

But, you know what? I wouldn't be eighteen again if I was offered immortality. Whatever I call this age: "Late Middle Age", "Early Mature" or just plain "Old", this is the best time of my life. The pressures of youth to look cool, be competitive, be desirable and generally live up to this image we think people have of us (or want people to have of us or think people SHOULD have of us) is a hard master and an impossible one to please.

The ambition to one day rule the world is replaced with the optimistic hope that nursing homes will have improved by the time our offspring decide we're too feeble to live at home and far too irritating to live with THEM. The anxieties of parenting have faded into the satisfaction that our kids survived our dysfunctionality after all.

I'm too slow to live fast, too old to die young and the window of opportunity for a good looking corpse has long since passed. Life, in general has become easier and a lot more comfortable. I can now wear trousers that fit around my waist instead of being strapped to my hips and elastic waistbands have replaced the neo-medieval leather belts I favoured in the 60s and 70s.

My body has become something of a mystery to me, however. I expected to go bald as every male on both sides of my genealogy has done so. But, if hair LOSS is an aspect of growing old, why am I sprouting hair from every orifice? My nose, my ears, my...... well, you get the picture. It seems that the hair that once confined itself to my scalp is being redistributed. I'm sure that Nature has a very good reason for this but I can't for the life of me figure out what conceivable misfortune is likely befall me that is directly attributable to not having enough hair up my nose? My eyebrow hairs, which seemed content to confine themselves to growing to a finite length throughout most of my life, have suddenly developed an ambition to be plaited or dreadlocked. My eyebrows now have to be trimmed and combed, my nose-hairs have to be trimmed, my ear-hairs have to be trimmed and my head, which once sported the bohemian hairstyles that so outraged my parents' generation, now requires nothing more than a wipe with a damp cloth.

All in all, getting older is not so bad. The Sweet Bird Of Youth' that flew so fast, eager to explore its world is now a rather decrepit chicken that is not only in no particular hurry but can't remember where it was going anyway.

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