Another Birthday

Yesterday was my birthday; I am now officially one year older and have taken yet another faltering step toward my bus pass, retirement, pension and ultimately death.

I am never sure if we should feel any different when it is our birthday, should by being a year older than you were yesterday, or in my case the day before, make us feel older, and if so how exactly do we do that ? Feeling older surely is a gradual process and not at all the same as getting older. The fact that I am no longer able to run as fast as I once could when I was a teenager, for example, is perhaps a mote point when I now find it difficult to run at all and perhaps now see no good reason to do so, why run my mind questions, there is no sense in it. But does this mean that this now enforced inability to run with any sense of purpose is a case of getting older or feeling older, perhaps it may be both.

When I stand now in front of the mirror I see staring wistfully back at me a slightly overweight slightly haggard looking man well past his prime with a slightly bulging stomach and hair growing out of his nose and ears. What I feel inside when I stare into that mirror is that I am transported back more than forty five years to a fifteen year old schoolboy with more than a twinkle of mischief in his eyes, a thirst for adventure and a hunger for life. A boy who grew up in what now seems to be those black and white days of the fifties and sixties, a boy who witnessed before him the change of an established society, a boy who became part of that change and embraced it wholeheartedly. There is a proclamation that states, that if you remember the sixties then you were not there, well I do remember the sixties and I was most definitely there and what fun it was.

Is it always the case that many look back and tell everyone who might stay long enough to listen about how good it was back in the old days, do they really mean that, was it really so good back then, when ever then was of course. I find myself doing that, I often now sound like my father when I now tell my grown up children about how it was much better when I was a teenager than it is today for teenagers, I see my children rolling their eyes heavenwards just as I did so all those years ago. Of course it was not better then; modern society and modern technology make life today so much easier and so much more comfortable and much more exciting. But then I also remember that it is my generation [generally speaking] those like me who grew up in the fifties and sixties that have invented, devised adapted, updated and brought this modern technology we have today to the masses and think they have done so not out of necessity but out of learning.

I am of the group in my generation that grew up pre decimalisation, pre calculators, and computers, pre colour television and pre space travel but also of that group who were the first to miss National Service, my group of my generation grew up on the cusp of social reform and I am glad of that. The writer Alan Bennett mentions about his own growing up in Leeds during the forties and fifties [though he did not miss National Service] that his education was free, though perhaps not free but owing as it had been paid for by that generation before him that did not have it and they had in kind paid for it. Like Alan Bennett my education was free and I am glad of it though sadly and as I know to my own cost much of it is not free today.

Our children and grandchildren today do have things [though not as much as we think] that are free, it is their right, though free to them today but paid for by us yesterday.

And so here I am another year older, another birthday come and gone, and so statistically and legally I am one year older however I am inside still that fifteen year old kid I always think I am and when I close my eyes for a moment in my mind it is still 1964.