When Were We Happy?
In 8 days’ time, against what I considered to be ‘all the odds’, smoking, drinking and over-eating, I will reach the staggering age of 71. I will have outlived my poor mother by 13 years. Ambling along through Mansfield town centre this morning behind a phalanx of shopping pensioners, I felt mildly miffed as they were trundling ahead of me three abreast, completely blocking the pavement, chattering away, tartan Dorothy bags in tow, and virtually reducing all pedestrian traffic in their wake to the same slow shuffle. I wanted to ‘get on’ and cross over to Wilkinson’s to get my masonry nails. But then it hit me: speed didn’t matter anymore. Since schooldays, like most of my peers, I’ve had to keep an eye on the clock. Work and the challenge of earning a living demanded it. We were governed by capitalism’s hoary old chestnut ‘Time is Money’ or John Lennon’s “the future is what happens whilst you’re making plans for it.” But once you reach a suitable crossroads in age, which I have decided is seven decades, then the life you have led takes on a different hue. Time stays. We go. ‘Time’, as the great screen writer Ben Hecht once said, ‘is a circus always packing up and moving away’.
Hecht’s comparison to a circus steers me to the subjects of memory and happiness. The end of a Circus, when you’re a kid, as the marquee is taken down, signifies the end of happiness in the same way as one views the bleak, January bareness of a living room once the Yuletide tinsel and the tree have gone. So it is at the age of 70. Can old men be happy? Perhaps Santa Claus can be because he’s immortal. The rest of us, at least those of my own morose mind-set, search through the packed, creaking cabinets of our lives looking for emotional souvenirs which, when assembled together as a group, might remind us that all that servitude to the clock at least gave us some moments of contentment. Most of those gems only appear as such in retrospect. Childhood summers, the birth of our children, the day of our marriage, days of success in our employment, those sun-kissed holidays and barbecue weekends of domestic togetherness. They parade through our memory like sepia photographs now, never to be reproduced, protected by the copyright of time. Can old men be truly happy? Perhaps not.
How could my wife and I have ever imagined, for example, when our lovely daughter Sarah was born in 1966, and through all those bright formative years of her childhood, that she would only reach the age of 47? I have a close, dear friend, a brother almost, approaching 70 now, whose only child was taken unexpectedly in 2009. Week in, week out, we share one another’s undying grief. My sister in law has cancer. Another good friend informed me yesterday that he too has the ‘Big C’, and he hasn’t reached 50. So time is jam-packed with tragedy and anger, like a slatted fence around our lives. Only by peering through the cracks can we see the bright shafts of what we recall as happiness. Time also robs us of our dreams, destroys our bodies, eats into our brains, rots the memory and eventually drops us in our tracks like a stunned beast in an abattoir. I know I’m being far from cheerful here, and when the remaining calendar ahead of you has shortened (if you’re lucky), to a decade, you begin to wonder if there will be any more shafts of happiness to look back upon when you reach the big eight-O. If there are, they will have to match the following dozen memories, which are just a fraction of the overall collection:
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1. The whole family, sitting around a bar table on the Southampton-Cherbourg ferry circa 2004, drinking pint bottles of Heineken, and singing along with the ship’s bemused cabaret band as they performed Bill Withers’ Lovely Day and Lionel Richie’s All Night Long.
2. Together with all our friends, the Over The Hill Club, at Black Sail Youth Hostel in the Lake District, where alcohol was frowned upon yet we sent out for jerricans of ale to supplement the bottles of illicit rum and vodka which had been smuggled in. We had a hootenanny that night, utilising the antique instruments which were hanging around the walls, and in the morning, our leader, Gerry, washed his gonads in the stream outside in full view of a camp site occupied by teenage Born Again Christians.
3. Lying in bed in the dark in France in an old cottage listening to Simon and Garfunkel on my Walkman.
4. Every Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with our children Martin and Sarah. (Correction: every day we ever spent with them)
5. Our honeymoon in a stormy Scarborough in April 1966.
6. Meeting Smokey Robinson in his dressing room at Nottingham, 2007.
7. Seeing Martin receive his Doctorate at Hull University.
8. Sarah and Ivan’s wedding.
9. Getting my new 2 litre silver-grey Ford Granada with carphone - and electric windows (!) in Grimsby in 1987.
10. Wendy and I enjoying our 25th anniversary in Paris.
11. Me, Dave Iles and Mort Williams singing folk songs at the Empress pub in Hull.
12. The Over the Hill Club’s 3 days in Whitby in 2005.
Can Old Men Be Happy? Maybe they can when they look back. The difficult part is the challenge in looking forward. The scrap book or the photo album, are not yet full. The trick is to leave no empty pages when you go.