There was a sketch in Smack The Pony (a Channel 4 comedy show, for those of you too young to remember: I hate you), where a woman made a video of herself for a dating agency. In it, she explained that she wasn’t actually looking for The One, with the life-changing levels of commitment that such a relationship might entail. She wanted to meet The One Before The One – for that failed, somewhat crap relationship you have first. “So I’m looking for somebody who is either staggeringly good-looking,” she said, “but a bit dull. Or someone who is absolutely hilarious but… er… ugly, so that I can go out with him for a few years and get confused, but ultimately realise that he is not the total package.”
It was in a similar spirit that, for the first time in my life, I decided not to celebrate my birthday last weekend. Not because of awkward affairs with stunning men, but because, in birthday terms, it was the one before the one. My 39th. The funny but ugly one.
How do you celebrate not quite turning 40? How do you make a fuss of entering the last lap of the decade in which you’re supposed to do all the things you haven’t done yet: the book you haven’t written, the debts not paid off, the love you haven’t fallen into – and all those other children you were going to have. When it feels as if the car has arrived home before your favourite song has finished playing on the radio, and you just want to sit in the driveway and let it carry on to the end (while your shopping slowly and quietly begins to defrost in the boot, and the neighbours wonder if you’re having a breakdown or a divorce)?
I had an anxiety dream about my birthday the night before – the anxiety being that I couldn’t make my Facebook settings work to let everyone know it was my birthday, and so nobody noticed. Or maybe the dream was that the settings worked fine and nobody noticed anyway. Hard to be sure, I was sweating so much in the night. (What do you mean, I recently wrote something about having deleted my Facebook account? Erm, yeah, well, it magically came back again.) Anyway, the well-wishing arrived, but the party did not, because I had pretended it wasn’t happening. All my friends had gone to Glastonbury, so I ended up taking my three-year-old to the shop, so she could choose a card for me to buy for myself, and then writing in it for her, and then giving it to myself as she proudly looked on. Which sounds a bit tragic in print, but seemed quite entertaining at the time – I must be getting old.
Anyway, people who have crossed to the other side tell me that turning 40 is actually great fun in the end, and something of a relief. All the 40th birthday parties I’ve attended have indeed been brilliant – like a wedding without any weird bridesmaid vibes or the pending thrum of divorce. The real problem, apparently, is in the years after that, when you turn a pointless 41, or a nothingy 42, and you realise that these birthdays are just going to keep on happening to you. At which point you start saying that age is nothing but a number, a phrase that indicates a person so truly terrified of ageing that they can maintain their sanity only by dissociating themself from numerical systems entirely. Or you say, like a wild Latin lover in a Sophia Loren film, that you’re as old as you feel. I’ve done this for years, passionately proclaiming that I feel “about 34”. It turns out that feeling “about 34” was no use whatsoever in the campaign against having a 39th birthday. It still came.
I remember now, on my fifth birthday, someone asking how old I was, and I said four, because I’d forgotten. Then they walked off, and I was suddenly gripped by pure horror as I realised I had missed my first opportunity to tell a new person that I was five. I suppose the only way to regain that sort of excitement at being alive is to accept the present moment and start living in the now, as the wise Buddhists tend to say. I think that will be my next big project. The perfect sort of thing to make a start on in my 40s.
