Today finds me questioning why we celebrate each complete circuit around the Sun. Something we can no more control than the day we were actually born. And yet so much fuss is made of it. I’ll admit to being much more at the Eyeore end of the spectrum, though I do hope to receive more than a burst balloon and an empty honey jar.
It doesn’t help that my big day is no longer as big as once
it seemed. I’ve had a bit of a strange run of birthdays in recent years. My
wife was away for two of the last three; and whilst I am airing grudges, I
still am getting mileage about my parents not taking me out of school on my 10th
birthday 3 ½ decades ago. The other thing that doesn’t help is that you are
expected to work and do all the normal adulting stuff.
One aspect that troubles me less is the age. Whilst the number
ticks up on the odometer of my life with each passing year, it’s just a number.
It’s unavoidable. This attitude may seem odd given I have just written a book
about ageing and death. The central conceit of which is that I have somehow
passed a tipping point from youth into middle age.
But one of the things that researching Live Forever
made me realise is that since time is passing and there is nothing we can
really do to reverse the onset of ageing there is very little point in worrying
about it.
So, where does this leave me? Well geographically I found
myself on my own exploring Kraków, the day after sitting in a slightly too hot
room, reviewing scienece with an eminent professor from the Baltics who for
some reason chose to remove his shoes for the duration. For once though, I had
built in enough time to do something other than the usual Airport-Novotel-Conference
Centre-Airport-Home. But what I didn’t quite succeed this time was to persuade
anyone else to up sticks and to join me. And whilst I would like to visit it,
the idea of touring a concentration camp on my own as I enter my late-late 40s
was a bit too bleak.
So instead I packed my running shoes and am just back from slowly ambling along the Vistula, pondering events that happened merely 30 years before my birth and feel more worryingly close now than they have in the last 30, which in it’s own way is no less bleak. But let’s not end on that dark note. On the flight here, I treated myself to an Easyjet meal deal, ending up with an empty Pringles pot in which to store any burst balloons I acquire. Eyeore would no doubt be quite envious.
