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R.I.P. MIDDLE AGE
Why...
Am I not dressed in grey leather shoes and polyester trousers?
One of the casualties of every generation since the Silent Generation (1935-1950), has been the demise of Middle Age.
Right now, the only limits to me behaving as I did in my youth are physical.
I do not own a tartan coloured shopping trolley with matching tartan booties. I don’t possess a cardigan, a pipe or a jacket with leather elbow pads. Nor, do I endlessly suck on a Werther's Original caramel or have a glass by my bedside for dentures.
Right now, if you take a photo of a group of a hundred people, they may display their own tribal colours but within that tribe, between the ages of 25-65, are actually pretty alike.
Yet when I look at photos of my salad days and at people now my age, they all appear distinctly different to the youth that’s with them. The women are all dressed in ‘A’ line skirts surrounded by Tupperware containers. The men either have a comb-over or a short back and sides haircut, and are in ties and lace up brogues, even on weekends. Folk barely fifteen years younger are in jeans, with varying lengths of hair and a perpetual grin on their faces.
All the middle aged were so different from the youth. They all respected the speed limit and positions of authority. The men shaved every day but the women never did. Married couples were rarely able to travel beyond home shores and certainly never ate food that was not either frozen or a domestic recipe. There was fear of the foreign rather than curiosity. And nearly all had the same job in the same firm all their lives. Sad.
My generation has actually found the secret to eternal youth. Act like you want, not how you should.
I may now wake up with a sixty-year old’s body, but my mind and mannerisms are distinctly those of a thirty-five year old. I ignore that old man as I get in my car for a blast down a country road, work out in a gym or cuddle my beloved wife.
...and another thing
However, this eternal youth mindset has overspilled into a few areas that are not so wonderful.
When the graves of the current generations get unearthed in a couple of hundred years because the lack of space requires cemeteries to be built over, I wonder what they will think with finding coffins full not only of bones but plastic blobs for buttocks and boobs?
I believe that behaving young is being mixed up with looking young. You really don’t need Botox to jump out of a plane, or have a colonic irrigation to go swim with sharks. You just need the right mindset and a healthy disregard for societies previous rules for the ‘mature’.
Unfortunately some things have not caught up with this new view of age. Questionnaires for example that not only break down into five year age groups but then end with 55+. Unless the questionnaire is for life insurance, age is now pretty irrelevant.
I have some friends who began a ‘prepared meals-at-home’ company for pension aged clients which is regularly advertised on British TV. They said that the change in diet over the past ten years has been extraordinary as the Silent Generation die out and are replaced by the next generation, The Baby Boomers.
Demand for artery clogging goodies such as steak and kidney pudding or jam roly-poly has dropped off a cliff as the Baby Boomers become old-age pensioners. They want vegetable moussaka, salads, chicken tagine, or lamb curry. These up-to-date meals are no doubt accompanied by a decent bottle of red and maybe a rolled wacky-baccy cigarette, before going off to bed to listen to Led Zeppelin and chew on a Viagra.
So, until I am watching grass grow from the wrong side, I am still the naughty, loud and irreverent sod I’ve always been.
Stay safe.
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