AGE AINT NOTHING BUT A SLUMBER

AGE AINT NOTHING BUT A SLUMBER
Age is funny, it is all relative, yet it is finite, yet infinite. Age is something we have never fully discovered, it baffles us as much as it did the stone age men. After discovering fire and perfecting flint blades, they must have still sat around wondering why they can’t chase the antelopes like he used to. I sat and thought about the time I have seen in my life. When I was a child, I couldn’t wait to grow up. When I wanted to get a bike to replace my outmoded tricycle I was told “not till you are five”. I eventually got one aged seven. Then I saw people riding motorbikes and I wanted one “not till you’re 16.” I waited patiently for the time when I could have a motorbike but they were a serious health risk with guaranteed brain damage. Couldn’t drive till 17, couldn’t vote till 18. Couldn’t be an MP till 21, couldn’t do this or that. This especially thwarted my life because I am an early developer for example I was ready to be an MP aged 20 but I had to wait a whole year and by then it was too late.


Now I still see benefits of being older, I see the older people with all the money. They have high-performance cars that they choose to drive slowly, they have money that they insist on spending wisely and they just seem to bobble along. They alternative is hideous, the human being is designed to retire and relax in older age. This was proved to me today as I watched Glastonbury with the venerable Iggy Pop was hobbling around on stage. His defining image is his rippling torso thrusting with vitriol, now his emaciated corpse creaks onstage like a see-through biological model. His skin so thin you can see the workings of his gut, his bile was his bile itself. Why didn’t he age gracefully? Maybe it’s the money, the girls, the drugs but you’d think they’d have lost their charm by now.


You get more cynical and conservative as you age; I was horrified to find myself agreeing vehemently with Jeremy Clarkson. It took a while to sink in as I realised I had become the enemy. But things ain’t what they used to be, damn it. It wasn’t meant to be this way. You always got a plan, do this by age that, do that by age this. What you never say is DO X WHEN I’M READY! Because that is the truth it isn’t about your age, it’s about when you ready. I remember asking my mum her age when I was about 7. “30? Oh Mum that’s really old.” I am a year older than that and I don’t have kids, I was meant to have kids by now but the timing is by readiness and not by chronology.

In some ways you never age at all, mentally at least, issues I had in my childhood affect me today WHY WONT THE OTHER KIDS PLAY WITH ME? This happens every time I start a new job and I don’t know anyone so I feel nervous, the other day I went to a party and saw this. This sweet boy was sat all alone while kids who all knew each other played, he edged closer and sat on the fringes but it was like nobody saw him. I had to introduce him saying something like THIS IS X, BE NICE TO HIM.


So my Clarkson moment, he was hounded by the PC brigade for calling a car ‘a bit ginger beer’ I didn’t see the car but I supported his right to call it so. You can’t say anything now there is; racism, classism, anti-Semitism, ageism, disabiltism, sexism, homophobism, anti-Islamism, fat-ism. Every generation says this as language changes and we redefine what is acceptable. I imagine a white guy in the 70’s saying “you can’t call them sambos anymore, or niggers. It’s PC gone mad.”


It is a fact that as you grow older you get more and more conservative. You think the media is a liberal conspiracy, that a cabal of evil masons rule the world, that the EU is trying to destroy your life. The usual; kids today have no respect. Criminals have it easy, immigrants get it easy, the taxman gets too much, the schools don’t teach the right stuff, marriage isn’t sacred anymore. The rose-tint of memory calms our nerves on a cloudy day. “I remember when you could get a bag of weed, a hamburger, into the clubs and a ride home for £20!” I see that happening in a nursing home around 45 years from now. One of the most humbling things you’ll ever see is letters from ancient Romans, the Vindelanda letters. In one of the a woman bemoans the lack of morals, respect, honour blah blah. It shows that man never changes because he goes through a social evolution with age.


I used to be a student activist, I wanted to bring down the system; I wouldn’t even know what rally or the cause I was shouting for. We had a loose amalgam of interests on the fringe of the system and we had to break in and tear down the system. In the morning it was Gays, then Palestine, then world poverty, then human rights and all topped off with an anti-capitalist romp. The police would come and it would get exciting, kudos and street cred were the prize.


Now you realise the gays are the new blacks, the blacks were the new Jews, the Jews were the new Irish. The liberal fringe always uses disadvantaged groups to ram its way through to power. A liberal guy was once telling me how blacks and gays are the same, I was sceptical at first; yes we both face discrimination but he corrected me. He told me how gays were taken from Gayland and huddled in ships head to toe, then they were forced to work in the fashion industry for 300 years. They were lashed 300 times if the fabric they produced wasn’t soft enough or unstylish. I cried by the time he had finished, the tragedy.


So now I slumber into conservative middle-age, in my views at least. If youth is about nuance; you want to see it from all sides, then older age is about certainties. I know there is no chance of peace in Palestine. I know that racism will always be there. The poor will always hunger for the basics. What can we do in the meantime? We can ban words; the N-word, the C-word, the F-word referring to gays (to distinguish it from the other F-word. The Poor became “economically disadvantaged” the N-words become “ethnic minorities”, benders become “same-sex couples” and things get better. The basic dichotomy is Liberal vs. Conservative is; the Liberal has a vision of idealist heaven, he first seeks to portray this vision then strives to achieve it. While the Conservative has seen this before and knows it can’t work.


We blacks thought we were special but we were just another group that needed saving. It’s like the Superman dilemma. Why is he saving those people? No matter how good your cause you must have a reason. Is it altruistic? Narcissistic ? Or just a reflex. Is he saving those people coz he is Superman and that is what he does? Do liberals save out of reflex? Because they need to be saving someone, Liberal is short for liberator. While the right is caught up with big-business, the left is caught up with victims.


In the 60’s while they were high off nature’s finest hallucinogens they hatched a plan “We’ll start with the Blacks, then we’ll do the women’s lib thing, then Nuclear, Gays, Fox-hunting, Gay-marriage, then anti-Iraq war. Trust me it will be great.” But where now? Should we Liberate the animals? Maybe the liberals will have to save us from our worst enemy….. Ourselves! We are a danger to our own well-being. We smoke too much. We drink too much. We eat too much and not the right diet. We live a life of constant excess so they are have to curb these excesses by legislating. In a way we are committing suicide by pleasurable excess. Age is wear and tear, it is come and go, it’s just a number and every cliché is true.


I hope the liberal idyll comes to pass, like the newscasters laugh along multi-culturally to banal jokes while in a set like the Star ship Enterprise. We’ll all sip fair-trade tea with locally produced milk, in a carbon-neutral house with a hydrogen cell-solar powered sports car on the drive in the middle of an Eco-town somewhere in a nature paradise. I look forward to consuming, just spending my money. Holidays, cars, rare exotic food, all the things that would harm the polar caps.


I once hatched an audacious plan to take over the world, it was a brilliant strategy, the genius of which hadn’t been seen before. I was going to start locally and then go global. I would take over parliament eventually (peacefully), the EU would know my wrath, then the UN, then the outcome GLOBAL DOMINATION. But when I got outside it was raining. I hadn’t planned for that, my whole plan was hatched without accounting for rain. Now that I am older I no longer make such amateur mistakes, I plan for extenuating factors. When I’m going out to take over the world I carry and umbrella or at least wear a thick coat.