My 21st birthday was great – it’s a pity I wasn’t there!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

In a few days I’ll have to use my 56 year-old brain to remember that I’m no longer 55. Throughout my life I’ve given thanks for the fact that I was born in 1960, so when confronted with the question of my age, I have minimal maths to perform. There’s no carry two and divide by six about it.

My so-called landmark birthdays came and went without so much as a flutter of existential angst: 21; 30; 40; even the half century slipped by without so much as a mental twitch or whiff of mortality.

However, completely unexpectedly, turning 35 knocked me off my socks. I just couldn’t work it out, suddenly feeling my age and not liking it.

I had to come up pronto with some kind of explanation so decided it was because my Dad was always going on about the ‘three score years and ten’ we are allocated in the Bible.

Thirty-five is half of 70, so I reckoned maybe I was just suffering from passing a subconscious half way line, with all traffic now heading inexorably out the back door.

I prefer to think that it doesn’t matter whether your age is divisible by ten. Sadly life and human brainboxes don’t work as we might wish, and 46 came along and knocked me sideways with a right hook I never saw coming.

Why couldn’t I just conform and attach significance to the same big birthdays as everybody else? Hoh no, I had to twist myself through a special test, some kind of left-field self-experiment in which I was the guinea pig.

Even more bemused than usual, I eventually realised that 46 meant I was nearer 50 than 40. Good old fashioned fear, that was the reason for my downer, so now, a few days from being nearer 60 than 50, I’m delighted I’m not working up a sweat about this impending number change.

Our decades illustrate more than the mere fact that we have ten fingers and count accordingly. Since my group of lifetime friends known as the London Posse and I turned 50, we’ve all noticed changes affecting our lifestyles.

It comes as something of a blow to discover that cures and recoveries are often no longer available.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.