Worried about getting old? I’ve been embracing middle-age for decades

I had a birthday last week. It wasn’t a notable one; not a milestone to be cheered or feared, although the next one of those – still a few years off – feels faintly impossible.

Some people like to go all out for a birthday. One friend used to be deeply offended if we didn’t turn up to each of the three or four events she’d planned as part of her annual festivities. I generally prefer to let birthdays steal up on me, then pass swiftly. On my twentieth, I forgot what day it was until nearly noon.

This ambivalence about the anniversary of my own birth is not some sort of Peter Pan complex. True, I’d rather my hair wasn’t getting a bit thinner, and that my knee didn’t ache, but broadly speaking the ageing process holds no terrors.

In many ways, in fact, I embrace it. “Middle-aged” feels like a badge of honour. But when can I reasonably be sure that I have joined the club?

At some point in the last year or so, I realised that I had taken to sitting down while cleaning my teeth. Not every time, but quite often I’d find myself feeling a little weary and thinking that this was an ideal moment to have a micro rest. So, I’d perch on the edge of the loo, let the electric toothbrush take the strain, and just chill out.

My music listening habits have also started to shift. Not that they were ever cool – at least, never trendy – but increasingly I turn the dial to Radio 3. And late in the evening, especially in the winter, all I want to do is listen to choral pieces by the great Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, or Rachmaninoff’s Vespers.

For my birthday last week, my wife gave me a lovely pair of green (yes, green) linen trousers with an elasticated waist (I know!). They look a bit like medical scrubs crossed with the kind of thing a retired judge might wear to a garden party – except for the elasticated waist bit.

Importantly, this was not a present out of the blue: I am not being gaslighted into perceiving myself as a right old buffty. No, these comfortable trews were a conscious choice, spotted in a mail order catalogue that came through the door one day in April. Green’s a nice colour for trousers, I thought; and an elasticated waist would be both comfortable and convenient. What’s not to like?

All these signs surely point in the same middle-age direction. What’s more, with life expectancy for men in the southeast of England currently sitting at 81 (not accounting for the impact of the coronavirus pandemic), the chances are that I am now more than halfway through my life. If middle-age isn’t now, when is it?

Then again, if age is only a number, middle-age is only a mindset. And if the truth be known, I’ve been fostering it ever since I was in my mid-teens, when my primary interest was collecting Second World War memorabilia and I was a member of the local bowls club. Not long after leaving university, I took myself off to north Norfolk for a few days of solo contemplation and spent half my time investigating the architecture of local churches (St Mary’s in Titchwell is a beaut). And by the time I was in my mid-twenties, after a few years of moderate hell-raising, I’d realised that really there was no better way to spend a summer’s evening than to sit in the garden, slowly drinking a glass of sherry and listening to the world go around.

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I wonder sometimes if the age of social media has increased people’s anxiety about the passage of time: a product of knowing so much more about the lives of so many other people who often appear to have done more than we have ourselves. In fact, life and ageing are much easier if you ignore all the external noise. And if you want to be comfortably middle-aged at 23, there’s nothing wrong with that. My only sadness is that retirement – and a glorious return to the bowls green – is still so far off.