My day begins with a slap on the face, and the sense – an eternal one – that I deserve it. Today, I most certainly do, as it is a special birthday slap from my three-year-old daughter’s tiny, spork-like hand, goading me to “Get up get up get up and come downstairs for…”
“Shhhhh!” my son interrupts, placing his own larger, seven-year-old’s hands around her mouth and telling me to get dressed, in the manner of a mysterious stranger in an action film who says, “Come with me if you want to live.” I drowsily do their bidding and tramp to the kitchen where both are standing – in fact, leaping – beside the kitchen table, with my wife beaming behind them. All are signalling the presents on the table, and soon I am being beset by stiff sheets of paper. My kids’ card is homemade, a green affair festooned with dinosaur stickers and bearing a charmingly inscrutable message, penned by my son: “Happy birthday! I hope you’ve been waiting because it’s your birthday.”
My daughter hands me a felt-lined cubby case for placing things neatly at the end of my bed. My son hands me a small book. It’s a tourist guide to Amsterdam, referencing my wife and I’s mooted plan to travel there in February next year. Opening its pages, I find a printed-out hotel booking, which has confirmed the trip for good, and I rejoice. I am being spoiled. My wife’s card bears a more pleasingly heartfelt and sappy inscription, albeit with a 13th-century monk on its cover, welcoming me to my “middle-ages”. I am, after all, 40 years old.
I hadn’t given much thought to turning 40 before it happened, other than as an excuse to get loads of people together for a knees-up. Well, two knees-ups actually, one for my Irish pals during our half-term jaunt to Dublin, and another a few days ago in London. Both were lovely and involved seeing loads of friends and family and being showered with presents and attention, among my favourite things with which to be showered.
Most of those present asked me how I felt about turning the big 4-0. Initially, I told the truth, which is that I don’t really feel any way about it at all. This was a bad move, since it turns out people find this a very disappointing answer, unbefitting of a birthday boy. Soon, I was having more success by cringing, fretting and offering oblique references to the slow march of death. For some reason, people like it when you do this. I think it’s either because they are young and callow and find it charming that you, a walking fossil, are being an awfully good sport in your old age, in the manner of a hilarious rapping granny in an Adam Sandler movie, or because they’re older than you and are, thus, delighted you’ve finally joined them, groaning and dog-eared, in their cult of geriatric pessimism.
Most of my friends are people who’ve passed 40 and regard ageing with a little more despair than I do. I don’t know that any of them have had a full-blown midlife crisis per se, although I’m not sure what that would look like nowadays. An ear-ring? A pony tail? In childhood, the standard sitcom cliché was that of buying a sports car, which suggests the economy really was once better than it is now.
I’m not immune to paranoia about ageing, but I realise I might be more sanguine about it because my interactions with cool young adults are fairly limited. Not that they can’t still be disarming when they arise. About once a week I head into Soho to work for a small print magazine I co-edit with five other people. All of them are younger than me, some drastically so, and occasionally this administers mild psychic shocks to my system. Discovering, for example, that my dear colleague Kieran has no memory of Euro 96, because he was only born several weeks before it kicked off, took me some time to get over. This was merely a primer for when Ralph joined and became, there and then, the first fully grown adult I’ve known who was born after 9/11.
Nothing was more of a revelation than a recent trip to Ireland, however. Each summer, I do interviews for the Belfast dance music festival AVA, and regularly end up surrounded by beautiful, positive and accomplished twentysomethings. At one point during my last jaunt, just such a room of young people began avidly swapping tales of disastrous Hinge and Tinder dates. I offhandedly mentioned I’d never used a dating app, because my relationship with my wife predates the invention of the smartphone by about six months. Now, I realised, it was me doling out the psychic shocks, as I looked up to find my youthful colleagues were staring at me as if I was a gnarled and toothless corpse they’d just pulled from a bog, one which had now gasped back to life, demanding mutton and hog’s blood.
With something like reverent horror, they listened as I went on. Whiskers grew from my cheeks as I informed them that, for many years, text messages didn’t show you when the other person was typing. “You couldn’t even tell if they’d seen or received your message,” I told one, while another cast me a worried look and asked me I’d like someone to fetch me a chair.
Mildly affronted, I told her I was fine. And then, on second thought, I took her up on the offer of a sit down. Becoming a walking fossil has to have some perks, and some slaps in the face are easier weathered than others.
Photograph by Getty Images