the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

Yesterday I became a year older. It’s a very granular way of recording age, but it’s what we do. Do I feel any older? Not really, aside from the general wear and tear that comes with more than seventy years on the planet, but there are things that I notice as I have got older.

Change is constant, and perhaps you notice it more as you age, simply because you have lived through more of it. The value of experience is often underestimated, but that experience can be relevant to a different time and place, so it always needs to be evaluated in the modern context: What worked, or failed, in the past may yield a different result today. Whatever, we all need to learn our own lessons as part of growth. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

For me, I didn’t really think too much about aging until I was well into my sixties, and the generation gap became vividly obvious. Some of my work involved teaching and mentoring young people with aspirations to obtain professional qualifications, and I would often explain how and why processes and legislation had come about, things that, according to my young hopefuls, was before they were born. Talking to them about the way the world had been was akin to describing an alien landscape.

The gap was equally clear the other way, and the lifestyle and tastes of these folks were just as alien to me. The music, films and other entertainment that they enjoyed, in the main, left me cold, but I accepted that. It was some of the attitudes to work, and business, that differed so much from my own that began to make me feel old. Had I become a dinosaur? I tried not to think that way, but it was clear that the baton had been passed from my generation. Time had moved on.

Physically I know that my body is well past its sell-by date, with joints in particular showing signs of wear. I don’t have the same stamina either, and two serious illnesses in the last year, one nearly fatal and the other caught quickly enough for it not to have got that far, have left a mark. During last years’ spell in hospital I had to learn to walk again, and I walked with a stick for some weeks. In other ways I have been lucky; at 72 I can still walk seven miles a day, and occasionally hit double figures, I still have my hair and am often told that I don’t look my age. Recent tests after my illnesses have shown that there isn’t much wrong with my vital systems, so that part of aging hasn’t taken too much of a toll.

The worst aspect, for me, is that the world I now inhabit is not one that I enjoy. Changes in society do not suit me, not here, nor in America, where the Berkshire Belle and I had been considering emigrating to. We are ten years apart in age, and had hoped to grow old together in the sort of world that we grew up in, but that world is long gone and will never come back. If I had a choice, I would like my seventy odd year old self to be living in the England I knew around 1966-68. I could happily swap mobile ‘phones and the internet for a gentler way of life.

That’s the problem with aging for me: I no longer fit in the world around me.