3
Youth
Middle age comes up fast for the usual reason things come fast: because we didn’t notice it coming slowly. There were warning shots, but when you heard them you jinked and you thought that’s why they missed, and when shots miss enough times, you think you can’t be hit.
THE TWENTIES
I don’t miss my twenties. God, my twenties were awful. I realise this isn’t a common view. Given the choice a lot of people might freeze their lives in some golden moment of twentysomethingness when a bra is only a style choice and men have so many erections they can afford to ignore some of them. But that’s madness. Unless you have one of those lifestyles that actually require you to be in your twenties – professional sperm donor, say, or Donald Trump’s next wife, or a poet in the First World War – your twenties are usually a waste of not being old.
I reckon I could take the twentysomething me in a fistfight. Not a real one, obviously – my cunning and enhanced willingness to cheat might give me an advantage now but that guy was very reckless with his personal safety, which goes a long way in a fist-fight. Also, that guy felt he had something to prove, and fanatics are dangerous. But in most other ways I have the edge. I worry less how my hair looks these days. My clothes fit better. I know how to talk to women now. For that matter, I now also know how to talk to men. (Top tip for talking to both men and women: it doesn’t make as much difference as I used to think whether it’s a man or a woman I’m talking to.)
There are only two ways I can think of that my twenties were better than my forties.
1. Hangovers
When I think of hangovers gone by, I start to worry if I’m even the same man. That fellow wasn’t human. He applied alcohol to himself like a man using a mallet on a coconut. When Muhammad Ali introduced the technique of the rope-a-dope to George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa in 1974, there were long sequences when he would sag on the ropes while Foreman whaled on him with fists like folded manhole-covers. You thought Ali would surely die. No man could take that and be the same afterwards. No, please, not his face! His pretty face! Then Foreman, tuckered and arm-weary, would cease his whaling to gasp for air and Ali would dance off the ropes, smiling like a child actor on a red carpet, and assay some nifty skip-steps while waving to the crowd with a glove like a rose. In this metaphor, you understand, Foreman was the alcohol and I the young Ali.
In the morning after a night of grievous orally applied self-abuse, I’d rise and cure myself with a Panado. A Panado! Sometimes two, if I’d really run away with myself. I can’t imagine a problem nowadays so small that it could be solved with paracetamol. Offering a Panado to one of today’s hangovers would be like throwing a peeled litchi at Vladimir Putin: if he even noticed, it would only antagonise him. It used to be that you would describe your hangovers to your pals and boast about their savagery, but now it’s like coming back from Vietnam or Uncle Trevor’s garden shed: things happened over there and you just can’t talk about them, not even to the ones closest to you.
The worst part of today’s hangovers is that they’re the undeniable voice of the truth. They’re like the slave standing at the ear of the conqueror as he takes his golden triumph through the streets of Rome, murmuring, “Memento mori.” (Which must have been a rough job. Bad enough being a slave without having to be the official buzzkill as well. Where’s the job satisfaction?)
I can normally convince myself that nothing has changed. My life is carefully arranged to hide any signs of flagging vitality: I politely avoid feats of strength and decline gruelling tests of endurance and I make sure I’ve limbered up properly before tying my shoelaces. It’s true that occasionally a combination of teacups, standing and breathing might give me trouble, but so far not often. For the most part I feel pretty good about things. Then I take a drink and feel even better. Well done, sir, I say to myself. The younger you wouldn’t have handled his drink this well – by now he’d have gone charging the bar like the Light Brigade. He’d be starting conversations by asking probing questions of complete strangers and directing sly single entendres at any lucky ladies nearby. But now look at you: you can pace yourself. You haven’t once tried to sing along to the music without first swallowing your wine. You may not be young, exactly, but you’re better than young! You’re young-plus!
Then in the morning you wake with the great iron wheels turning in your head, crushing unto bone meal and dust all your dreams and hopes, your self-regard, small woodland animals, everything. And there’s a banging on the door and when you answer it the hangover comes into your home like a Serbian ruffian and puts you in a chokehold and drags you to the mirror. Look! it says, in its coarse and unpleasant accent. Look, damn it! This is who you are now. Ecce homo!
2. Sex
Allowing me to use my penis in the 1990s was like sending a chimpanzee into a hostage situation with a semi-automatic weapon. No matter how carefully you’ve briefed him, sooner or later he’ll get over-excited and spray the room. Maybe he’ll hit some appropriate targets but he’ll also take down lots of innocent bystanders and probably shoot himself in the foot. And he never runs out of bullets.
I thought I was terribly cool and adult in my twenties but really I was like a pressurised fire hose that someone dropped and is snaking around the scene, soaking everyone. I was always trying to have sex before I actually wanted to have sex. I know twentysomething men are supposed to want to have sex all the time, and maybe I did, but sometimes I didn’t, if you know what I mean. Still, I felt obliged to try whenever I could, like some opportunistic shark of the tropic seas: if I don’t have sex when I can, if I wait until, say, next time to have sex, then maybe I won’t have sex at all. I hadn’t yet discovered that sometimes not having sex is a pretty good way to spend an evening.
My friend Dan says it’s not having sex in his twenties that he misses, it’s having sex with people in their twenties. I don’t even really miss that. Even when I was younger, I preferred older women. Partly that’s because older women have lower expectations of the sexual experience, which is a sensible precaution when bedding me, but also because women are only really interesting once they’re in their thirties. Women in their twenties are too outdoorsy, too summery, too thin-skinned, taut and energetic to be sexy. They lack the low, slow, languorous, paprika-like potential energy of a woman who has had enough time to be a woman and to decide what it feels like. And oh, the way a good perfume smells on a grown woman. Perfume on a woman in her twenties just smells like something sprayed on skin; a grown-up woman’s blood runs warm and thick like a Coleridge poem and heats the oils differently to release the sinuous rills and sunless seas and murmuring bassnotes of the body … I’m sorry, what was I saying?
Yes, older women. I used to sleep with older women whenever they’d let me. I’m not sure what was in it for them. Maybe they were going through a midlife crisis. Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe they saw me the way my friend Dan sees young women: he thinks they’re attractive, but really they’re only young.
Whatever the unhappy path or blind alley that led them to my door, I definitely had the better end of the bargain. Most were kind and hid their disappointment well enough and sometimes even found encouraging words to say: “Next time will be better”; “I liked your enthusiasm”; “It’s nice to be with someone who tries so hard.”
One woman, let’s call her Lorraine, knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was for me to stand around more. What did she mean? Did she want me to tamp down my natural dynamism and be less of a go-getter? I thought I was already doing some sterling work in the goofing off and lazing around department. That is not what she meant.
“When young men take their clothes off, they’re too self-conscious,” she said. “They hunch over and scuttle towards the bed. Take your time. Be proud.”
Her implication was that older men drop their trousers and stand around like proud Greek statues. There is nothing that so smarts the eager young lover than the suggestion that older dudes do something better, so the next time I disrobed, I stepped clear from the puddle of jeans and struck a pose copied from the Super-man underpants I had when I was nine: hands on hips, chest thrust out, chin lifted to stare into a heroic middle-distance. A bit like an undressed Lenin, come to think of it.
I don’t have children so I haven’t had the experience of watching a child’s face as it opens a Christmas present to discover something that it wasn’t hoping for at all, but thanks to Lorraine, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m missing.
“Mmm,” she said, a little like the sound a mom makes when receiving “You’re the Fire” perfume for her birthday.
Thinking that perhaps it was all a little too static, I marched around a little. Let her get a gander of the majesty of me in motion.
She averted her eyes. “All right,” she said. “Thank you. Point taken.”
(Now that I’m older, I realise she must have been bluffing the whole time. No older man wastes valuable time touring the bedroom like a walking hat-rack. After a certain point an erection is like creative inspiration – you don’t know where it comes from or when it will come again, so while it’s here you’d better get something down while you can.)
But it’s true that my twenty-year-old self had some logistical and administrative advantages when it came to sex. I don’t like to be crude, so let’s just use an appropriate metaphor … um, let’s see … all right: let’s say that I could, uh, submit the paperwork more often and with less advance warning. Then again, I generally needed to do it more often in order to get it done properly: where I excelled in quantity of, uh, paperwork, I often let myself down in duration.
Oh, let’s be honest, I didn’t let myself down – I lasted just about exactly long enough for me. Save your sympathy for my partners. Sex with me was the essence of Hobbesian life: nasty, brutish and short. Never mind the paperwork metaphor, I was a grass-court player in what is, really, a clay-court sport – I’d play a few forceful forehands then rush the net, which is fine if you’re John McEnroe and have a subtle touch and some neat angles when you get there. I was more like Tim Henman or Wayne Ferreira: usually I’d fold under the pressure and have to feign an injury.
There are some techniques the over-enthusiastic can try out for purposes of extending the experience. Some patently don’t work: counting the seven-times table backwards just makes you stare at the wall with your lips moving silently, which is unsettling for whoever’s underneath you because you seem to be either praying for forgiveness or arguing with the voices in your head. Also, I would get stuck on seven times eight, and there’s something uniquely demoralising about failing at sex and arithmetic at the same time.
Then there’s the technique of picturing something green. I can’t vouch for the science of this, but allegedly the colour green delays orgasm. If you don’t have a potted fern nearby, the thing is to imagine something. I tried it out. The next time I was, uh, filling out an order form, I took a mental peregrination through the freshproduce shelves down at Pick ’n Pay: broccoli, limes, yes, those are nice limes, elastic-banded bunches of spinach, mmmm, heads of lettuce, firm avocado pears … I don’t know that it worked, precisely, but afterwards I certainly felt healthier.
On subsequent occasions I pictured the green glades of Amazon rainforests and the Zoo Lake bowling green and the sweet summery Newlands outfield. But a young man craves sexual variety. Seeking different hues of greenness, your mind wanders down ever more baroquely verdant pathways: Robin Hood, Yoda, the Incredible Hulk … there’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of this, but you do start to wonder: where will all this end?
I’ll tell you where it ended. It ended on the day my mind opened some horrendous green door to find that the secret it was keeping was … John Robbie in an Irish rugby jersey. He looked me in the eye and gave me a thumbs-up. Take it from me, John Robbie and his thumb are the last thing you want to see before you orgasm. No, hang on, I mean, he’s not the last thing you want to see before you orgasm … wait …
I almost feel that’s enough detail, but I suppose I should mention that there’s also a physical manoeuvre which involves reaching down at the moment critique, taking hold of the, um, the … no, it’s no use, I can’t think of an analogy with the world of paperwork, I’m just going to have to say testicles, and giving a firm tug in the opposite direction. This allegedly stalls the moment and buys you extra time.
There are certain drawbacks to this technique. One is the question of physical dexterity. Unless your arm is very long – if you’re an orang-utan or an octopus, this would be right up your alley – it isn’t so easy to give yourself a good backwards reacharound. Try it yourself right now, if you don’t believe me. Practice is key, because you don’t want to find yourself groping around back there for the stable door when the horse has already bolted, finished the race and is now getting a good rubdown and a nosebag of oats.
There’s the further danger that your bed-partner, being in a co-operative mood and unwilling to stand idly by while you blindly fumble around your nether regions, might helpfully try to lend a hand. This involves the very real probability, nay, the inevitability, of someone who doesn’t have testicles miscalibrating the vigour and power implied in the phrase “firm tug”, thus resulting in the following dialogue:
“Macaroni cheeeeese!”
“Sorry, too hard?”
“Hanyani shimangi!”
“Wait there, I’ll fetch some ice.”
“Ngggggggg.”
I suppose an even bigger danger is that the human’s brain is our most adaptable sexual organ, and if that happens enough times you might start to enjoy it.
THE THIRTIES
My thirties were great. They were definitely the best of it so far, although considering they’re only up against the teens and the twenties, that’s not saying much. To be worse than the teens and twenties, my thirties would have to involve a flesh-eating disease or an attack by giant spiders.
But before you can enjoy your sweet, giant-spider-free thirties, you first have to be twenty-nine, and that’s a jolt. One minute you’re chugging along, ejaculating everywhere and hangover-free, and the next … twenty-nine? That’s … that’s almost thirty. Jesus and Jim Morrison were dead by now. Thirty! This is the end! Thirty’s the finish line! It’s all over!
But no, wait – I’m a thinking man, I’m a rational ape; thirty’s not really that long, is it? Three decades just sounds like a long time because “decades” is one of those fancy words they use in history class. Let’s see, let’s just do some basic counting to get some perspective here … thirty years before I was born was … uh, let’s see, carry the one … no, wait, I must have counted that wrong. Thirty years before I was born was the Second World War. I can’t be almost as far from my birth day as my birth day was from Dunkirk! Either there’s a problem with my maths or history is lying.
Let’s not get carried away – there might be a third option. What if someone is doing something to the very mechanics of time itself? Who’s to say some evil bald Bond billionaire in a hollowedout volcano hasn’t invented a giant gyro-whirligig to literally speed up time, so that a second and a minute and an hour each pass a little faster than they used to, and no one can tell because all the clocks are speeding up at precisely the same rate? So the only way we can tell something is happening is through our subjective experience of time going faster, which everyone agrees, but the scientists don’t listen to us because subjective experience isn’t something scientists listen to? What if this is happening right under our noses and I’m the only person who has rumbled this scheme?
“Or maybe it’s not a super-villain,” I said to Clarence urgently and adamantly one night, because it’s silly to still suspect super-villains when you’re nearly thirty years old. “What if it’s some kind of naturally occurring electromagnetic thing?”
It was quite late at night, which is the time of day when twenty-nine-year-olds get most urgent and adamant.
“What kind of thing?” asked Clarence.
“I don’t know. A singularity.”
“What’s a singularity?”
“It’s like a thing. But there’s only one of it.”
“Like a panda?”
“No, there’s more than one panda.”
(This was around the turn of the millennium, when people still worried about pandas. I don’t know what happened after that – it’s all rhinos and polar bears now. Pandas need new PR.)
Of course, there are other theories about why time seems to be going faster, other than Bond villains and electromagnetic singularities, but none of them are especially convincing.
1. “Time is relative”
According to this, when you were ten, a year was 10 per cent of your life experience, so it felt like a long time, but when you’re forty a year is only 2.5 per cent, so it feels four times shorter.
I reject this explanation, and not just because it involves maths. By this logic, those blokes finishing the Comrades should have more and more fun as the race goes on. The first kilometre should have seemed like the longest because it was 100 per cent of their experienced misery, and the last kilometre should feel – what? – ninety times shorter? (I’ve never run the Comrades but I have flown long-distance in economy class, which is more or less the same thing.)
2. “It’s not time speeding up, it’s you slowing down”
According to this piece of slander, time always passes at the same speed but our mental processes are winding down, so it seems faster out there. According to this we’re like a Cape Town driver on a Joburg freeway: everything’s a blur and we’ve changed lanes before we’ve had time to indicate and everyone is hooting and waving their fists at us. “Yikes!” we yell. “Everyone drives so fast here!” When actually everyone is driving normally and it’s we who are the slowpokes and dullards.
The problem with this is that it assumes some high point of mental acuity when we were young. When I look back at the cretin who lurched through the world in my skin twenty years ago, I don’t see some grandmaster mental athlete with lightning synapses. That guy was a dolt. I wouldn’t trust him to operate a Chelsea bun without making a mess of his life. I’m not saying I’ve turned into Professor Cranium since then, but it’s not humanly possible to have become more dumb. There are used elastoplasts clinging to innercity bicycle tyres that are smarter than that numbskull.
3. “Diminishing stimuli”
According to this, when we’re young we’re constantly learning things and taking in new stimuli. Learning is like fibre in our diet: it slows things down while we digest it. As we get older we stop learning new things, so it all becomes a big milkshakey smoosh of refined carbs and empty calories, and time flows by like a doughnut smoothie.
Right. As though we can avoid learning new things. The older you get nowadays, the more everything is new. I’d only just mastered programming my DVD player when PVRs came round, and just the other day someone gave me a flash drive, if that’s the correct word, with a pre-streamed and downloaded TV series, if any of that makes sense to you, and I spent an hour trying to figure out where to plug it in on my TV. (The answer: it plugs into that place on a TV that you’ll find on a TV that comes with a place where you can plug it in, i.e. someone else’s TV.)
The world comes up with more new things every day: Mars rovers, Cloud devices, weather patterns, God particles, new bits of technology with the letter i- in front of it, transgender politics, predictive algorithms, SnapChat … I don’t even know what Candy Crush is yet. The ageing process in the modern world is one long Rimbaud-like derangement of the senses, a kind of dreamt, half-panicky madness where you’re constantly trying to unravel too much new information and learn new ways of using it. When it comes to stimuli, middle age is the new five years old.
*
While I was writing this, my partner read some of it over my shoulder, which is something I wish she wouldn’t do, but there’s no sense starting a fight when I’m hoping she’ll make some lunch.
“So what is the reason that time speeds up, then?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do I look like a neurochronologist?” Which may sound snappish to you, but bear in mind I hadn’t had much breakfast.
“So you’re just shooting down other people’s theories, and you have none of your own?”
“Didn’t you read the bit about the Bond villain?” I demanded. “Or the electromagnetic singularity? And by the way – a doughnut smoothie actually sounds like a pretty good idea, doesn’t it?”
She nodded thoughtfully and went downstairs, hopefully to where the lunch is kept.
“Stop reading over my shoulder!” I yelled in a whisper.
But she’s right. The months and years fly by and I don’t know why, and it all started when I was twenty-nine.
I would soon be thirty and what had I done? Nothing, compared to other people who did things before thirty. I tried keeping a journal, to slow things down. The idea is each day you write down what happened during the day, no matter how boring, or actually especially if it’s boring. That way the days won’t slip down like a delicious crispy, cinnamony smoothie – they’ll be all fibrous and you’ll have to chew them over. You’ll have the sense of living through them twice. Plus, with a journal, I won’t have this sense of being here and not knowing how it happened. I’ll be able to riffle through the pages and find my tracks across the sand. Even if I’m not anywhere, at least I’ll know how I got there.
It worked for a while, but the problem with keeping a journal is you have to be disciplined, and if I was a disciplined person, I wouldn’t need to keep a journal. The first part of every journal session was spent frozen in a thinking position in front of the journal, trying to remember what had happened since last I’d remembered to write. Hmm, let me go back and read what I wrote last time, maybe that will help jog my memory … let’s see … “Must remember to write in the journal every day.” That’s not very helpful. “Was walking down the street today when a Coke bottle fell on my head from a low-flying aeroplane.” I don’t remember that. “Snuck on board the Titanic and fell in love with a chubby girl and painted her naked. Later the ship sank.” Wait a second, I’m just making things up from movies. “If you’re reading this in the future, I have travelled back through time to warn you that you’re in great danger.” Now I’m just messing with myself.
Anyway, no amount of calling it a “journal”, or a “secret code book” or “Captain’s log” can conceal that what you’re doing is writing a diary. You’re just Bridget Jones with bigger underpants.
I drew up a List of Things To Do Before I Die. If I’d reached twenty-nine so fast, I’d obviously be sixty-five by breakfast tomorrow, and if I didn’t have a list, nothing would be done. I believe in lists. Nothing has ever been done that’s not on a list.
Noah’s list:
If it goes on the list, it’s only a matter of time before it’s accomplished and then grandly crossed off in koki pen. Either that, or it will stay there until it’s too late and doesn’t matter any more, and then it will silently drop off the list like one of Stalin’s rivals. Either way, it’s a win.
Examples of items that get typically get crossed off:
Examples of items that typically linger till they drop off the bottom:
When I started the List of Things To Do Before I Die, it wasn’t called that. It was called the List of Things To Do Before I’m Forty. That seemed far enough away, so I could have some breathing room before going out to:
I bought a spiral-bound 100-page A5 Croxley Student Notebook to hold the list as it expanded, and as I flip through it now, I can report that the list has climbed to seventy items. Number 70, most recent, is to walk among the Mountains of the Moon, which I suppose isn’t terribly likely, given that the Mountains of the Moon are a legend and don’t actually exist. Still, “likely” is a relative term on a list that includes “Set free a turtle” and “Search for the Loch Ness Monster, minimum two weeks’ duration”.
Each time I achieve one I cross it out and write the date next to it. Not to boast, but this has happened three times already, and if I carry on at this rate I will definitely work my way through my list before I die, provided I die in 2334.
Just having the list is calming. Writing things is almost as good as doing things – in fact, in some ways it’s better than doing because you don’t have to make all those phone calls.
*
I had my thirtieth birthday in the gentleman’s bar of the old Rosebank Hotel. It was a fine old place, empty as a bottle, so dimly lit it was like drinking in the boot of a car. There was never any music and it had a circular bar in the middle where Leon the Barman lurked like an Easter Island stone carving, polishing glasses. Leon was a lugubrious dude but he made the best martinis in the world, using only Gordon’s gin, ice and what seemed like too much vermouth till you tasted it. He had the subtle hands of a conjurer and I suspected him of palming something into the shaker, but these were the days before video cameras in cellphones so it was hard to prove.
I wasn’t sure anyone would come so I didn’t tell Leon it was happening. I cut my hair for the occasion and put on a dark suit. I wore proper shoes and had them polished. If I was going to turn thirty alone in a bar, by god, it wouldn’t be in sneakers.
People did come. At midnight Leon, who had been shaking martinis for five hours like an arthritic maraca-player, shouted at everyone to go home and never come back and I thought, “Well, it’s all over now. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll be thirty and everything will be different.”
The next morning I woke up, just as predicted. To delay the awful moment of confronting myself, I decided to open my birthday presents. I would open them and take inventory and then I’d sit down and write thank-you letters, because I am thirty now, and a man of thirty doesn’t wait a month before writing his thank-you letters.
There were the usual bunch of novelty gifts you’d expect from the lame-asses and detrimentals you hang around with when you’re twenty-nine. There were bottles of fig-based laxatives (Dear Chunko, what a thoughtful gift), a pink plastic artificial vagina (Dear Rob, do send my best regards to your mom) and someone gave me three silkworms in a perforated shoebox which they’d gift-wrapped, somewhat nullifying the perforations. (Dear Rachel, thank you for the dead worms). Then there was a pair of white pyjamas.
They were soft, light, summery cotton, with attractive large mother-of-pearl buttons. You could imagine padding through your house and onto your broad veranda in such pyjamas, greeting the postman while the golden sun rises over your rose garden. You could open your correspondence in pyjamas like that, then idly compose an urbane ditty on the piano. I hope you don’t think I’m overselling these pyjamas, because in fact I hated them on sight.
I hadn’t worn pyjamas since I was ten years old. The only adults I’d ever seen in jammies were my grandfather and Mr Snyckers from our church who sometimes went walking up the road with a colander on his head to see if the Germans had invaded. Who would be so snide as to give me a pair of jimjams for my thirtieth birthday? What secret enemy, what smiling foe, what skulking frenemy? I’m only thirty and thirty is the new twenty, and I don’t need pyjamas yet! What next? Slippers?
I threw the jarmies from me in a righteous rage, and that’s when I realised: the throw was good! My joints still swung on their hinges! My teeth didn’t crumble when I clacked them together! The old structure must be still sound. I hardly even had a hangover. Nothing had changed! I was still me, just thirty, and thirty didn’t even sound that old any more. I’d been rolling it around my mouth so long I’d grown accustomed to the taste.
Age is obviously a myth, a boogeyman that grown-ups use to frighten us. I was scared of it when I was twenty-nine, but now I’m a man and I’m no longer afraid of childish things. I haven’t grown old and therefore I will not grow old. An exception will be made for me! Something will happen! Yes! How could I not have realised this all along? Age is just a suggestion, like a parking ticket: if you ignore it, it will go away.
And then not very long ago I found myself in an idle moment going through some drawers and rooting through boxes and wondering what’s inside those packets, and it so happened that I came upon a pair of old, white, folded cotton pyjamas.
They were still in good condition, which you’d expect because they had never been worn. Out of curiosity, I tried them on. Not bad. Perhaps a little snug, but oh my, so soft and cottony. These would be so pleasant to wear while opening my correspondence on a sunny morning …
And it’s then, sitting in your pyjamas, thinking how cosy it would be if you had a pair of slippers, that you realise you’re thirty-nine years old and your girlfriend is telling you it’s time to see a doctor.