Sixty One Today

Sixty-one today. Is there a song about it? Feels a funny kind of a birthday somehow, sixty was a definite 'landmark' - a 'Big Ben' of a year - but sixty one is like living in some jokey suburb like Tony Hancock and East Sheen, just plain anonymous. It also reminds me of all those corny old jokes too. What was it Victor Borge who used to say "By the time Mozart was my age he'd been dead for twenty two years already".

It interests me how perceptions of age change from generation to generation. When I was a child my grandfather looked like an old man to me even though he was only fifty. And I have a nice portrait photograph taken of him around then and the truth of it is that he really DID look like an old man at fifty, he still looks like that to me now. My generation - ageing hippies - has actually aged pretty well on the whole, my grandfather in turn might have been a bit shocked by his juvenile sixty-one year old grandson.

Mind you, if any of my friends in Lancaster are reading this I do have to say that there are still a few of us around who DO look our ege eh? You can take this darn flattery too far.

We are also as old as we feel and usually I feel like I'm around thirty or thirty five but maybe sometimes that old but after slightly overdoing it at the pub the night before. By inches it feels to me that there is a slight danger in that - we happily go on using up our days forgetting that time really does fly like an arrow. there's many things I've done already and don't need to do again and also if I'm making a long term plan to do something now perhaps there should be a very good reason to commit that time because even taking an optimistic view it isn't an infinite commodity is it? There's the difference. I'm still 'me' and yet out of the corner of my eye I can see that in addition to that long list of those one-time 'to do' items I can now already cross off the list as impracticable - the Mt. Everest thing, becoming Prime Minister etc. - I ought to be bearing in mind more that the tank is no longer full of petrol. It is somewhere between half full and 'E' for empty and who knows just exactly what that gauge is actually reading?