Now we are fifty

30 March, 2015 (20:06) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

FIFTY years ago today I emerged onto this rock, screaming, farting and belching, looking like some hideous monster. The scene was re-enacted this morning as I was summoned into the day by two sons, two dogs and Brother Bertie’s bloody cat. If anything, the screaming has grown in volume over half a century.

Half a century! It scarcely seems possible. Where are all those years? Where are all the people? Where are the memories?

I can figure very little of my childhood now; I know it was largely content, and I can vividly remember dogs and days out, constructing imaginary stories about places we visited with my father. I can remember my long-dead grandparents, just, and therefore my blood link to a pre-First World War time that seemed then as distant as my childhood seems to me today.

I can remember many happy memories, almost all of them concerned with friends, loves, drink, music, books, travel, sport, company, dogs, walks, meals – and, of course, that.

I can remember terrible, terrible things I have done – betrayals, lies, let-downs, disappointments, evasions, angers.

Around me here I have physical evidence of my five decades that will outlast me: books I have written or helped write, newspaper cuttings by the thousand, pictures and paintings of my loves, and, of course, hopefully my two boys will one day, the Crab willing, be 50 too.

Inside me are the people who’ve had their decades – most of all, my friend John, who chose my birthday for his oh-so-premature death day and thereby entwined our fates more intimately than even schoolday friends could ever have imagined. I can never reach another year without reflecting on the fact that he has not; memento mori.

But the detail is fading. Is this what late middle age will be like, a gradual dimming of bulbs? Has the Coconut Eating Crab got a claw on a cosmic fading switch attached to what’s left of my brain?

Well, do you know, I don’t really care. As lights go out, more come on. Yes, being 50 at this place and in this time has its faults, many of them, but I prefer to think there’s as much fun to come as there’s been in the first half century. Damn it, I’ll make sure there is.

 

 

 

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