Seventy

Apparently it’s a milestone. Or should that be a millstone? I can’t remember which because I’m seventy so my brain doesn’t work. My brain didn’t work before, but then it was down to crazy living. Now it’s down to living long enough to be crazy. It’s expected. 

Soon I’ll be pissing in my trousers and there’ll have a gentle word with me about my driving, and I’ll give the car away to a distant neice and catch the bus instead, and sometimes a kindly neighbour might give me a lift, and I’ll repay their kindness by ripping the display out of the dashboard as I haul myself out of their car thinking the display is a grab handle - because everything’s a grab handle when you get to this age, or that age.

Hell - I remember my mother grabbing hold of passers-by, floral displays, broom handles, anything to stop the FALL, steadying herself against the back of a stationary taxi which drove off and left her sprawled and concussed in the middle of Shoreham High Street, whizzed off in ambulances, and eventually losing her mind in a corner of the geriatric ward of some far-flung hospital.

Oh, I’ll handle it with aplomb:

‘Don’t worry about that’ I’ll say, indicating the passenger seat, ‘that’ll soon dry off.’

And off I’ll go to cause mayhem in the post office, or the supermarket.

Millstone or milestone…either way it’s a bloody nuisance. This wasn’t in the plan, The Grand Masterplan Of My Life which I’ve never got around to planning because I was too busy putting one foot in front of the other.

One

Foot

In front of the other

One

Foot

Another foot

In front of the other foot

Feet, inches, miles, minutes, days, hours, milestones, months and years. 

And finally this fucking millstone: 

Seventy.

It was supposed to be glorious. It was supposed to reach a crescendo, but this is the way the life ends: not with a resounding chord, but with a whimper.

They say seventy is the new forty-seven or some such nonsense. And it is nonsense because I remember being forty-seven and this is nothing like that. I was a boy, I had my life in front of me with plenty of time to fritter my life away doing stupid things, and doing nothing, and not getting around to things, and pontificating, and putting things on hold, and thinking about things rather than doing them, because I had all my silly life stretching out in front of me like an endless school summer holiday.

I know how all this ends. I lay on a gurney with a team of doctors and nurses working around me, saving my life. It wasn’t scary but it was definitely final. The will to live is what makes dying scary. Once that falls away i think it’s very easy.

I’ve woken up in the middle of the night stricken with some imagined cancer (who hasn’t?) and felt, not fear, but fury, because I’ve got shit to do and I’m not finished, and I still haven’t found out everything there is to know. It’s no good denying it, and resistance is useless. This is a finite thing and the end is coming into view. I’m not giving up, but there’s a definite slowing down. I’m not Mick Jagger and I certainly don’t want to be Mick Jagger. I’m seventy, I’m no spring chicken, and if I look in a mirror and see a fifty year old staring back at me I’m smart enough to know that I’m deluding myself.

Here's a list of tour dates:

May

30 SUTTON, SURREY - the Sound Lounge TICKETS

June

01 NORTH SHIELDS -Engine Room TICKETS

o6 BIRMINGHAM - Rock n Roll Brewhouse TICKETS

09 COVENTRY - Just Dropped In TICKETS

20 LONDON, WALTHAMSTOW - Rock n Roll Book Club TICKETS