Age Purgatory

I’ll be 32 this month. Which is either lots of years, or not lots of years, depending on who you ask.

It certainly feels like lots of years. Lots enough for the hair in my ears and nose to come out of hibernation. Lots enough for the rest of my body to start casually hosting a revolution against itself.

I used to be firm. I used to run marathons. Now I’m soft. Like a past-due avocado.

The young body is malleable, like a Stretch Armstrong toy. The old body is brittle, like cheap kindling. The mid-level one is just a sack of fighting rats. One band of rats craves adrenaline. The other will go to war for a good nap.

I can still just about play cricket, but I’ve injured myself each and every time I’ve attempted to play five-a-side football in the past five years.

I’ve have not yet succumbed to the siren call of cycling lycra that enchants all men my age. Nor that suspiciously nasal-shaped adapter on my beard trimmer. All I’m saying is, I’m no longer mystified as to why people do either of those things.

Caffeine used to be a luxury. Now if someone gave me a spoon to melt down Monmouth’s crystallised form, I’d shoot it straight into my veins, the best medicine for the age limbo I find myself in.

I still dance at festivals, but I am now known to comment on the range and temperature of beers of offer too. Anything above 130bpm brings on palpitations, but not the wholesome caffeine kind. It just makes me realise how much my respiratory capacity has been degraded by a decade of desk work. Asked to review a Hungarian party recently, I simply recorded that “the logistics were impressive”.

Ideally sleep hours would be cumulative over one’s life. They seem to be resetting every day, these days. Ideally the thought of riding a night bus wouldn’t make me reflexively gag. But that’s where we are. Because I’m 32.

Or near enough 32. I don’t measure it in fractions like a child. My saturated adult brain just rounds 31 and eleven twelfths to 32, which sounds significantly less joyous. That child would probably describe me as a “grown-up”, but not an “adult”, I fear. They’d be right too.

Other people’s brains are saturated too, I can tell. Why else would they revert to such banal pillars of conversation like: “yeah, the renovations are going well, thanks” and “yeah, the dog is fine, thanks”. (Nb: pets are not substitutes for personalities).

I stole those snippets from a Facebook post, by the way. Remember Facebook? People with not lots of years don’t. They are growing up in a higher-resolution world than me. A world of hyper-connectivity that my 31-and-11-month-year-old brain has tried and failed to keep up with.

It’s not just my brain that’s saturated. It’s the rest of me too. I’m reading this screen with glasses I didn’t need. Typing with fingers that crack when they bend. They pick at a chin that somehow still gets spots. I am not thankful that part of my body is trying to hold on to its adolescence.

I feel like 32 is the holding pen of the human cycle. I’m too old for some of the good things in life, but too young for some of the other good things. A sort of age purgatory between raves and retirement which just involves spending all the money you’d ever made on stuff you need but don’t necessarily want.

My age limbo puts me right in the sour spot between people who have gardens, and people who actually know how to garden. If my house were a person, I would estimate its age at early 30s also. Far enough away from London to miss out on some cool urban stuff, but also far enough away from true countryside to miss out on cool rural stuff.

Can you count the bricks in a house like the rings of a tree to determine age? I might try it when we have children and upsize – the inevitable next stage of the human cycle, which is longer than a mayfly, but shorter than a giant tortoise, and which I’m increasingly realising I’m approximately 40% of the way through.

Try forgetting that stat when you wrote about financial planning and pensions for a living.

What joys await me for the next 60%? Plenty, I’m sure. Yet I fear all the classics have already been made. That’s why they’re called classics. We’re now left in a no man’s land of artistic landfill before scientists figure out how to bottle the cinematic equivalent of an orgasm.

That should make the next 60% infinitely more bearable at least. That and cashing in on all the good stuff on the other side of age purgatory, of course.