There is nothing remotely sexy about turning into a sexagenarian

It is the role of the old to dispense wisdom to the young, and the nature of the young not to pay much if any attention.

I cannot recall exactly when I passed the tipping point between having all the time in the world and knowing that I was about to hit a brick wall at high speed, but it must have been some time in the last decade.

The sensation is beautifully summarised in a Gary Larson cartoon of a sprightly fellow stepping of a kerb with a merry tune on his lips, then lying face down on the road with tyre marks across his back. With the caption: “The old age truck: you never see it coming”.

All of which came back to me very forcefully on Saturday at a grand 60th birthday dinner in Cambridge, where our host gave an excellent speech expressing his personal amazement at reaching this milestone, and counselling his children and their contemporaries to make the most of their time “because it will run through your fingers like grains of sand”.

Truer words were never spoken. I have succeeded in wasting most of my own life through a peculiar combination of conscientiousness and sheer bone idleness, meaning that I worked reasonably hard at narrowly defined tasks, whether schoolwork or paid employment, and shamefully neglected my personal relationships and leisure opportunities.

The only saving grace for me was an abortive attempt to retire at 50, which finally gave me the time and energy to find a wife (or, rather, allow a wife to find me) and produce two children. Because “father of” is going to provide much better reading on my gravestone than “half competent PR man, failed novelist and sometime columnist for The Journal”.

I started school a year earlier than most Geordie children in the late 1950s, and had my education accelerated by a further year through a madcap “flyer” scheme at the Royal Grammar School designed to get their brighter pupils to university 12 months earlier, for reasons never successfully explained to me or, I strongly suspect, anyone else.

As a result, many of my school and university contemporaries are a year or two older than I am, and have already embarked upon their seventh decades. It is easy to discourage them by saying: “So, old chum, if your life is a week, do you realise this is now Sunday?”

It is striking, therefore, that this weekend’s was the first and only invitation to a 60th birthday celebration that I have ever received. It is probably no coincidence that it came from a man who was a dear friend at Akhurst school from 1958-62, but then completely disappeared from my life until a couple of years ago. As a result, he lacked the crucial knowledge of how much of an asset I am likely to prove at a dinner, or indeed any other social occasion.

Still, I enjoyed myself and Mrs Hann can be relied upon to be the life and soul of almost any party, so I hope that this column may serve as a hint to anyone else drawing up a similar invitation list to at least think about sticking us on it.

I shall now begin to think seriously about how to mark my own diamond jubilee in June 2014, a date which I long had ringed in my calendar as the one on which I would write my last press release and put my feet up for good. A plan that responsibility for two very small boys clearly now requires me to put on hold for another couple of decades.

I was reminded, dawdling through Cambridge on a rainy afternoon, that the undergraduate society at the oldest college, Peterhouse, calls itself “The Sex Club” in honour of the college’s sexcentenary in 1884.

Cambridge: always providing food for thought

Inspired by this, I shall design suitable invitations to celebrate my becoming a sexagenarian. If nothing else, beautifully embossed cards advertising “The Keith Hann Sex Party” should keep my costs down by ensuring an absolutely minimal number of positive RSVPs, and those from people whose sight is too dim to read the words properly. Though I suppose there might be quite a few of those …

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Cheer up, mate - oh dear, it's happened

If scientists ever bring us a time travel machine, they will surely leave the 1970s off the destination dial. Who would ever want to go back there?

In my memory, over-mighty trade unions, inept government, high taxation and advancing world communism combined with terrible fashion and hairstyles to make it the decade from hell. Made even worse by personal poverty and the sense that an era of unprecedented sexual liberation was passing me by.

It was all brought flooding back by spending the bank holiday weekend in Cambridge, where I wasted most of the 1970s, and by the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory. Despite her cringe-making debut, quoting a prayer wrongly attributed to St Francis of Assisi, that seemed a ray of light after the years of strikes, inflation and general misery.

Today we are in a far bigger hole, where even the option of calling in the International Monetary Fund may be closed to us. I envisage a gloomy official shaking his head, like a typical British builder, saying “Wouldn’t touch it, mate. What cowboy done this?” While Gordon does his cheesy YouTube grin and points at Alistair Darling, like the bear in the hunter’s gun sight in my favourite Gary Larson cartoon.

Remembering the unreconstructed attitudes of the time, it surely took a mood of true national desperation to put a woman into No 10. Opting for a smooth Old Etonian PR man next year seems decidedly tame by comparison. Yet despite our truly appalling financial plight, morale now seems perversely higher than it was after the Winter of Discontent. Those of us who are still in work are far richer than we were then, mortgages are cheaper than ever, and even the tax rises are deferred. Hotels and restaurants still seem busy, and retail sales nowhere near as bad as the pessimists predicted.

The fact that every big media scare, of which swine flu is but the latest, turns out to be massively overblown, must surely be encouraging a mood of “Cheer up, it may never happen.” Perhaps we will look back and realise that it had but we simply failed to notice, like cartoon characters continuing to run long after they had crossed the edge of the cliff.

Keith Hann is a financial PR consultant who really enjoyed the 1980s.
www.keithhann.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.