The only way I can put it, really, is that the universe is calling me home – that it has decided to reclaim my atoms. I’m trying not to take it personally.
Shortly before Christmas, I slipped on a friend’s wet decking and ploughed face first into the edge of a step. A hospital visit, some stitches and a lot of Arnica later, I’ve been left with a set of facial scars that, in certain parts of rural Africa, might identify me as tribal leader.
Then, two weeks ago, picking my way over a muddy field while walking the dog, I fell again. A broken rib, this time. I can only sleep on my back, and then for just an hour or so before I wake up yelping. Sneezing feels like a war crime against myself.
What’s a boy to think, when gravity starts imposing itself with such malicious and mutilating glee, sucking you back and down into the soil? They say things happen in threes, which now has me inching down staircases like a baby sloth and cowering away from passing lorries. I’m staying back from high windows, too, and any toys that carry a choking hazard.
I was ruminating on this run of ill luck while getting a haircut (keeping a nervous eye on the scissors) last week. My new barber is one of my best and oldest friends. Until last year, he was an undercover cop, dragging confessions from murderers and taking down organised crime gangs. Forced to retire after 30 years’ service, his chat is suddenly all skin fades and undercuts. As career changes go, it’s on the unexpected side, but he seems happy.
My old friends are life’s consolation
He’s less happy that he turns 50 in April. The rest of us will arrive at that same heavy milestone the following year – a tight group of six pals who’ve known each other since pre-teen times and who have built up four decades of shared memories, embarrassing stories, private patter and unrelenting abuse.
Immediate family aside, these have been the most important relationships in my life. Whatever you’ve achieved, you’re not going to get above yourself when you’re greeted with “awright bawjaws” and the replaying of that time in Mallorca, aged 16, involving a toga party, three Irish girls, a near-drowning, a balcony of vomit, and a surprisingly understanding Spanish policeman.
To each other, we’ll be forever young and unchanged, but the truth is we’re knocking on, and 50… well, it’s a proper big thing, isn’t it? You’ve done more living than you’ve still to do and you can sense Fergie time hoving into view. And it’s not just me sporting life’s scars and barnacles, either.
One’s batteries start to go flat, the colour drains from daily life, and the bat signal goes up
In recent years we’ve supported each other through marriage break-ups, serious illness, depression, addiction problems, career crises and, in one case, a highly amusing episode of extreme hair loss. None of us has bought the farm as yet, though I suspect I’m the current favourite.
I don’t know where I’d be without them – they are life’s consolation. We don’t even see one another all that often, but there always comes a time when the need to assemble moves from urge to compulsion. One’s batteries start to go flat, the colour drains from daily life, and the bat signal goes up: I need to be entertained and have my ego reduced to a smoking ruin.
You are what you’ve lived and who you’ve lived it with
What gives me comfort as we’re corralled into this foreign land of irrecoverable youthlessness – with all its perilous challenges, its inevitable humiliations, diminishments, strains and leakages – is that we’re doing it together.
We have no choice, of course, simple victims of time like everyone else, but I know that we’ll snort and tease our way through it and that, when it’s needed, they will stand behind me, as I will them. It’ll all be done in that classic Scottish male way – never overly emotional, never too sappy or openly acknowledged, but solid and dependable as steel.
In this era of social media, where my generation was probably the first to embrace its constant forming and reforming of online friendships and alliances, it’s possible to mistake digital life for the real thing. It’s a thrill to feel a connection with folk hundreds of miles away or even on the other side of the world over a cause, a joke, a novel or a song. For a while in the 2010s, I wondered whether sites like Twitter were actually redefining the notion of friendship.
But, heading for 50, all that falls away. You are what you’ve lived and who you’ve lived it with, and if you’re lucky enough to have shared a lifetime with a constant group of friends, you have all the support network you’ll ever need, both psychological and physical.
Gravity will have to wait a while yet.
Chris Deerin is a leading journalist and commentator who heads independent, non-party think tank, Reform Scotland
