Birthdays: Getting old still beats the alternative

On Thursday it was my birthday.

I turned 55.

There, I said it.

No, I don’t look it at all, thank you very much – not a day over 35 in fact, if only because the picture above this column is me 20 years younger and about 9kg lighter, and I was never a redhead anyway. It was just the light.

But 55? Were my dad alive he’d inform me, annoyingly, that I was entering my 56th year.

He would not be wrong.

I thought I was fine about this mid-decade birthday until late Wednesday, as midnight approached, and I suddenly remembered that not only was I entering my 56th year, I also had just 16 minutes left before I would officially be closer to 60 than 50.

Closer to 70 than 40.

Closer to 80 than 30.

Sixteen minutes left to kill myself. Which seemed a bit drastic.

Instead I messaged a friend for sympathy, brushed my teeth (mindful that they were still in my mouth, and not in a glass beside the basin), put on whatever old T-shirt passes for pyjamas these days and went to bed, reminding myself I quite enjoy birthdays once they get going, particularly my own.

Is age really just a number?

But this got me to thinking about the birthdays we celebrate.

Before we’re 10, half-birthdays are carefully mentioned – I’m six and a half! – and every year of your teens is noteworthy until the final key-of-the-door nonsense at 21 (when nothing changes because you’ve been a legal adult since you were 18).

After that, there tends to be more fuss over the round numbers, 30, 40, 50…

Yet, for me, the halfway point in a decade is more consequential, when you tip over towards the next decade, nearer now to the next round number that the last, proportionally closer to the old person you’re becoming than the young person you were, the one you didn’t realise was going to change physically and mentally however much you fought to maintain yourself, the one you didn’t appreciate then, yet now when you look back at once-hated photos you think hey, I wasn’t half as bad as I thought.

Then you reconsider the things you dislike about yourself now and know that in a decade, at 65, you (I) will wonder why on earth you were so hard on yourself.

And then you remember that getting old still beats the alternative.