Turn That Racket DOWN!
Joeblade this week is brought to you by h
Hello. My name is Helen and I have a problem: I’m a cantankerous 40-year-old harridan trapped in the body of a nubile early twentysomething.
And I’m not alone. Everywhere I look my friends are listening to Radio 2, talking about pensions and complaining about the impossibility of getting on the property ladder. Why aren’t we all in Thailand finding ourselves, or in a warehouse listening to hard trance and getting monged off our gourds? Because we’re all Prematurely Middle Aged, that’s why. It’s a pernicious phenomenon that’s infected Britain’s young people, turning them from happy-go-lucky youngsters into a legion of whinging, miserable Evening Standard readers.
I think I can pinpoint the moment it happened to me. I was 20, in my room in the second year of university, getting dressed. Rolling out of my half-made bed with its obligatory ironic duvet cover (a sadly misjudged Harry Potter effort), I reached for my favourite trousers.
These jeans were legendary, of a width unparallelled in the annals of trouser. The circumference of the hems was so great they totally covered my shoes, giving me the appearance of a stately passenger liner which had been dressed as a skater. I bought them from a hippy in Birmingham aged 17, and they had done me sterling service.
Unfortunately, the unique combination of soft denim and needless length meant the hems eroded at a rate more usually associated with endangered Cornish cliffs, and so I had bribed some poor friend of mine to re-hem them with pink cord. (He had also added a jaunty pink star and, for no real reason, a sheriff’s badge on the back pockets.)
Middle age, precipitated
This had solved one problem, but created another. The bloody things sucked up water like nobody’s business, and wearing them in the rain became like dragging round two bloated and sodden sacks. That morning, it was raining (it’s always raining in Oxford). Suddenly, from nowhere, I thought: Oh fuck this. I’m wearing a skirt.
So you could argue that Oxford’s apparent position as Britain’s wettest city precipitated the end of my gilded, skater trouser-clad youth. Or perhaps it was bound to happen sooner or later. Whatever the reason, from that moment on the change was swift and irreversible. Within a few months, the pink crop went too, mutating into a blonde crop, then a brown crop, then an indeterminate mass of longish brown hair.
The hoodies were next for the chop, to be replaced with what can only be described as ‘lovely sweaters’. The piercings — 17 at their zenith — gradually withered and died (metaphorically, I hasten to add) and today, just my earlobe piercings remain. I feel reasonably confident that if I could go back in time and meet my 18-year-old self, she’d be horrified at what a bourgeois sellout I’ve become. I would just tell her to lay off the crisps and warn her that going on a minibreak with her next boyfriend will be a crushing disappointment.
Luckily, my friends liked the new, boring me. “Did you know,” said one of my best friends recently, “that I hated you when I first met you?” I spluttered, unwilling to believe I had not always been the warm, loveable, life-affirming person I am now. “Yeah,” she continued, “I thought you were like some mental lesbian with a bad attitude.” Now, my younger self would have accused her of homophobia; but I just chuckled ruefully.
It’s thermal underwear time
Since then, things have just got steadily worse. Radio 1? It’s just noise! The words don’t make sense! Clubbing? What’s the point of going out with friends you can only see once a week, then shouting at each other! A house party? Only if everyone promises to take their shoes off!
The only real question left is where will it end – in a year’s time, will I be reading the ads at the back of the Daily Mail and thinking, “Why, a heated gilet – how practical that would be in the winter months…”? Because if so, I think I should probably just end it all now.
So I’m worried for the future. If I feel middle-aged now, logically by the time I am actually forty I will have convinced myself I’m 60. But I don’t think it works like that — I reckon a key ingredient of being prematurely middle aged is being unencumbered by the responsibilities of adult life. Like kids playing in a dressing-up box, we’re all trying on the trappings of our future selves, safe in the knowledge it’s just an act. When the Big Life-Changing Events happen — marriage, children, (god forbid) a mortgage — it won’t be so fun to grouch along to Grumpy Old Men… because there will be no refuge in irony — we’ll actually think like that.
The trouble is, there’s no going back. Overwhelming student debt, rising house prices (sorry, but yes it does always come back to fucking house prices) and the fact I’ve fallen in love with my yuppie lifestyle mean that I can’t take a few years off to live in an ashram, or take more E than the Happy Mondays. What on earth would my future employers think? And dear lord, what if I get to 35 and everyone else is married and living in Amersham, and all I’ve got to show for my life is a good tan and a feckless boyfriend called Jared who’s a surfing instructor? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Now I have a new plan: there’s a time and a place for having a wild crazy youth, and its in your fifties and sixties. My parents, for example, are living the dream. They retired early last year and now go on more holidays than Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan. Occasionally they dandle a passing grandchild on their knee, but most of the time they spend sitting in the conservatory, drinking good wine and eating serrano ham (speciality meat products are, to them, the apogee of cosmopolitan life). And they don’t care about rising house prices: their home is long since paid for. They’re now talking about living half the year in New Zealand, the lucky, lucky bastards.
So, anyone fancy a rave? Get some questionable pills in, find a cool illegal warehouse party – oh, and give me a ring in about 38 years’ time.