WELL, IT’S time to own up to the fact that in February I turned 70, and was finally entitled to use the overblown adjective septuagenarian.
I have always thrown parties for those birthdays with zeroes in them, usually involving weekends away with family and friends, live music - often played with more enthusiasm than skill - fine food and good wine.
Ah, but my 70th - that was just me and ‘our lass’, as we used to say up north. Locked down by the government and officially banned from partying, we kept each other company and did Zoom calls with digital versions of our family.
I had taken my birth date off social media for security reasons and hadn’t expected any birthday greetings on Facebook, but my lovely goddaughter Gigi Trozado posted a splendid celebratory message, which 40 or so others saw and added to. It was unexpected and I found the messages very touching. And then the two school-age boys from next door delivered some cakes they had made for me in a hamper and the whole family of five sang happy birthday to me. Such sweet people.
So, as I write this I am 70 years and 36 days old. When people ask me what it’s like to have achieved the Biblical three score years and ten, I am first inclined to point out that the phrase comes from the Psalm of Moses, and that longevity has improved a little in the 3,000 years since it was written. It’s the grumpy sub-editor in me.
And then, less grumpily, I am reminded of Lewis Carroll’s Parody of Robert Southey’s pompous poem The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them.
Southey’s poem was didactic; a somewhat self-righteous lesson to youth. It begins:
“You are old, Father William,” the young man cried,
“The few locks which are left you are grey;
You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man,
Now tell me the reason I pray.”
Father William then goes on to tell the young man that he hadn’t abused his health, that he knew youth could not last and that ‘in the day’s of my youth, I remembered my God’.
Carroll’s parody is elegant nonsense, and these days much better known. You probably remember the opening stanza from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head -
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
And Carroll’s third stanza still brings a broad grin to my face.
“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door -
Pray what is the reason for that?”
Southey set himself up for the parody, of course. Victorian children would have been forced to learn his poem by heart for the common sense lessons it contained; imagine their titters of delight when, in 1865 it was parodied in a popular children’s book.
And I very much approve of the underlying message in the Carroll parody. Old age may not be the perfect time for acrobatics, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be fit mentally and physically. And to be honest, I found it a lot harder being 17. At least by the time you’re 70, you know some stuff (although you might not always remember it).
So, I have begun rewriting the memoir of my time on daily newspapers in the years before computers and mobile phones and digital recorders. I wrote the first draft about a year ago, and inflicted it on friends. But I should have remembered the Nobel prize winner Ernest Hemingway’s pithy observation that ‘the first draft of anything is shit’. My memoir reads well enough, but it lacks depth and the description is cursory; more journalistic than novelistic.
I’ll enjoy getting back into it; I have the time, and I type fast - and the best thing about being 70 is that your youth is half a century ago, so every memory is ancient history, often an utter surprise to younger people. Before computers? Before the Internet? How is that even possible?
And now I’ll leave you with another poem, by one of my favourite poets Roger McGough who is 84, I think. When he was much younger, and in the spirit of The Who’s hit song My Generation, he wrote a poem called Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death. The first stanza captures the mood:
Let me die a youngman’s death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death.
Later, in old age, he revised it completely. It is, I think a better poem. Here are the last few stanzas of Not for Me a Youngman’s Death:
No mistresses no red sports cars
no shady deals no gangland bars
no drugs no fags no rock'n'roll
Time alone has taken its toll
Not for me a youngman's death
Not a domestic brawl, blood in the hall
knife in the chest, death.
Not a drunken binge, dirty syringe
"What a waste of a life" death.
Age has made him a better poet. And one thing is for certain, neither McGough nor I will die a youngman’s death. We have both outlived the possibility.