My fortieth year on this planet begins. I spent the day alternatively laughing and almost crying at this prospect. Mainly laughing.
I swam 40 lengths at the pool, realising this was one per year and one for luck as I neared the end. It also struck me that anyone who hit 39 on the day of my birth would themselves have been born in 1928. That put how old I am into some kind of perspective. Thirty-nine years is a Hell of a long time. I am almost certainly over half way through now. Better pull my socks up.
I was laughing at myself and my stupidity most of the day. I am at the start of my mid-life crisis and doing all the stupid things that men of my age do to try and deny the fact that they are no longer young. I have bought myself Converse trainers and started wearing clothes meant for people in their twenties. Whenever I saw old people doing this when I was young I thought they were idiots, but now I am old I realise that they were probably doing it on purpose, because they knew it was wrong and that they found it funny. That is the case for me anyway. There is a self-awareness to it and an understanding that this is the last chance to behave this way - though maybe I can keep it going for another ten years.
I should be settling down and having a family, like my old mum is constantly teling me, but I seem to be avoiding that.
But even fate is trying to tell me it's time to grow up and stop being a sad and disgusting old man.
I was in Starbucks after my swim and two young women came and sat at a table opposite me. I would say they were probably 18 or 19 maybe slightly older, but I can be fairly certain that their combined ages were less than mine. They were both pretty and wearing short summer dresses showing off their pretty bare legs. Like a dirty old man I found myself looking at them, appreciating their prettiness, trying to ignore the fact that whilst what I was doing and thinking were perfectly natural, that given my advanced age I could only brand myself a dirty old perv.
I wasn't going to do anything wrong and I didn't stare (too much). I just looked and wished. We are all allowed to fantasise over the bare legs of women young enough to be ourt daughters and if we don't Al Quaida has won my friends.
Then the world intervened to tell me that what I was doing was wrong. A man arrived at the table in between me and the legs, pushing a pram. His son of about a year old was sitting upright looking at me and ended up being placed directly in the way of the legs that I had wrongly coveted. Fate was saying to me, "No Rich, you're 39. You shouldn't be looking at those legs, you should be having a family."
"Get the baby out of the way," I told fate.
"No, you are being dirty and wrong. You're old now. It is babies and not young girls' legs that you should be interested in."
"But surely I need to be interested in young girls' legs to have a baby."
"No, you need to be interested in the legs of women closer to your own age. Legs that are chunkier and less smooth and under sensible slacks instead of short floral dresses. Legs that have had their fun and are ready to give up on their own lives and devote themselves to their children."
"But I am nearly 40 and at the start of a midlife crisis, I have to become obsessed with the legs of women young enough to be my daughters."
"No, because unlike most men who have a midlife crisis you have never been married or had kids or even lived with anyone. You can't have a midlife crisis when you have spent your whole adult life living as if you are 21. You have to be grown up first."
"Move the baby out the way."
"Grow up!"
"God damn you world."
I've still got a year. I am 21 til I'm 40 and then I will do what my mum and society and the world wants. When I am 40 I will never look at a young woman in the sunshine with lust in my heart. So 364 days of this kind of wrongness to go. To paraphrase St Augustine, my favourite saint, because he was a dirty beggar, "God give me monogamy.... just not yet." (He actually said chastity, but I am not prepared to go that far for no-one).
