Growing old with 'dignity'

People over the age of 40 currently have a monopoly over the right to bitch about getting older. In my self-righteous, bleating opinion, this is an injustice which needs to be corrected. I often complain about the vast swathes of previously unexposed forehead that now prominently mocks me every time I look in the mirror, the noticeably longer time it takes to recover after pathetically brief periods of exercise and, most acutely, the fact that hangovers now have a habit of lingering like a particularly disliked party guest for days at a stretch. But voice these grievances to someone over 40, for instance my grandmother, and they will spit in your face, tell you that you can’t possibly complain about aging before you’ve even hit thirty and order you to go get them a fresh bottle of gin from the corner shop.

This doesn’t seem right to me. Surely the beginning of the path from our toned, sexually insatiable peak towards incontinence, senility and death is the most painful? Ok, those first few hairs left in the comb might be met with overconfidence, but when you first realise that there is a very definite, lonely island of hair forming, it’s a defining moment that has you crunched in the foetal position, crying hysterically, smashing mirrors and screaming at people not to look at you. So I’ve been told.

Similarly, it is the first realisation that the morning after a game of squash you can no longer walk without looking like a man who has had an erotic experience with a horse that hurts the most. By the time you reach your later years you should long have come to acknowledge and accept this. My point, if there is one in amongst this drivel, is that it’s the proximity to the prime you are moving away from which intensifies the snivelling, bed-soiling grief. I should therefore be well within my rights to complain loudly and continuously next week on my birthday, about how I can no longer eat what I want without ballooning into a morbidly obese freak and how I’m older than far too many professional sportsmen. I suspect this will make for an excellent evening for everyone I’m with.

Along with the imminent approach of the next annual milestone to my death, I was reminded of this subject by the fact that midweek I had considered something that had happened in the year 2000 and had instinctively thought of it as being not so long ago. It was only after a worryingly long period of further reflection that I realised this was ten bloody years ago. A decade. How the fuck did that happen? The only logical conclusion is that I’ve been in a coma for at least 6 years and nobody has gotten around to telling me yet.