Last Thursday, I turned 54. Generally speaking I don’t think about age – it’s irrelevant. Time passes, you get older, the end. Deal with it. Not far from home is a plastic surgery emporium that often I walk the dog past, and I think, why the fuck.*
One of my absolutely favourite albums is Sinatra at the Sands. In ‘The tea break (Monologue)’ Sinatra says, ‘Now I guess that you folks have heard or read or have been told somewhere that recently I became fifty years old and I’m here to tell you right now it’s a dirty communist lie. Direct from Hanoi – it came right out of there. My body may be fifty, but I’m twenty-eight. And I would further like to say that I’d be twenty-two if I hadn’t spent all those years drinking with Joe E. Lewis. Who nearly wrecked me. Remember the words of Joe E. Lewis, who said, “A friend in need is a pest.”‘
I remember being 28: I’d just finished the PhD and was off to live in Sydney with Sall. I’d just recorded the music that makes up This autumn year. It was a beautiful time, but I don’t want to go back to it; I’m happy to remember it with thanks. I wouldn’t go back even if I could because so many amazing things have happened since then and I know a lot more than I did then.
Because that’s the benefit of getting older: you’ve experienced more, you’ve felt more, you’ve learned more.
My wife and our kids gave me a birthday card that read, ‘You are handsome. You are smart. You are old.’ Luci was teasing me about this a couple of evenings later and I had to say, ‘I’m not as old as her,’ because Sall was born a month before I was. Then Sall said, ‘or as smart, or as handsome!’ with which I had to agree.
*Obviously plastic surgery is sometimes desperately needed, and for medical reasons. Taking nothing away from plastic surgeons who do this type of work, of course.
29/x/2025