Giv­en that it was defined by Covid, I doubt that any­one will mourn the pass­ing of 2021, although many of us may expe­ri­ence a twinge or two of regret as we con­tem­plate one less year in our allot­ted time. In the Mon­ty Pythonesque spir­it of “always look on the bright side of life”, here­with some mus­ings on wast­ing time by try­ing to fight its passage.

When I was in my 20s and set­ting out in the world, I made a list with the head­line: “50 Things To Do Before You’re 50.” I dis­card­ed some and missed the dead­line on quite a few. But I’ve come to realise that even at the stage where there’s a hell of a lot more of life to look back on, than look for­ward to, it’s still fun to keep try­ing to tick off items still on the list.

I was 24 years late on the tar­get of get­ting to Antarc­ti­ca, for exam­ple, but it was worth the wait.
What’s not worth the time and effort is buy­ing into slo­gans and gim­micks designed to con­vince us the vicis­si­tudes of age aren’t inevitable.
“Zoomer TV” (Slo­gan: ‘For Boomers with Zip’) would have us believe chang­ing one let­ter can turn we over 70s into what our heads lie that we are, even as our bod­ies tell us the truth.
No doubt the cre­ators and pro­duc­ers are the age of their tar­get audience’s grandkids.
And if we’re “zoomers”, why do the ads on the retro shows we watch include stair lifters to remind us how decrepit we’re sup­pos­ed­ly not?
Reminders of mor­tal­i­ty keep com­ing with increas­ing fre­quen­cy, with­out the need for ads.

                                 AVOID MIRRORS AND OBITS

The sound­tracks of my life are fad­ing to mute at an alarm­ing rate. When I read the obit­u­ar­ies of Leonard Cohen and Char­lie Watts, I thought of them as they were when I was young, phys­i­cal evi­dence be damned. It’s best not to dwell on the fact that they were in my age brack­et.Although amaz­ing­ly, peo­ple seem to be wor­ry­ing about get­ting old ear­li­er and ear­li­er. Covid led to a rise in plas­tic surgery. Men bare­ly into their thir­ties are get­ting ‘Botoxed’.
Appar­ent­ly, a dri­ving fac­tor is work­ing from home. “Now some are point­ing to video calls as the rea­son for a report­ed uptick in cos­met­ic surgery pro­ce­dures in what cos­met­ic sur­geons around the globe have called the “Zoom Boom.”
Real­ly? A face past mid­dle age with no wrin­kles isn’t some­thing to be cel­e­brat­ed. It’s not a sym­bol of per­pet­u­al youth, it’s a sign­post of a life not lived– no laugh­ter, wor­ry, con­ster­na­tion or curiosity.
There’s noth­ing wrong with mak­ing an effort to look as good as you can. Buy­ing into the idea that if you spend enough mon­ey you can look the way you used to, on the oth­er hand, seems a bit of a waste. The mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar cos­met­ics indus­try thrives on con­vinc­ing women to look in the mir­ror and see lines even before they are there. They’ll nev­er believe this, but I think I can speak for many old­er men when I say we cel­e­brate our “oth­er halves” with the best lines from “Pret­ti­est Eyes”, The Beau­ti­ful South’s homage to a woman turn­ing 60:
“You can’t have too many good times, children
You can’t have too many lines
Take a good look at these crow’s feet
Sit­ting on the pret­ti­est eyes”

                                        MEN HAVE IT BETTER

 I will con­cede that women have a far hard­er time than men when it comes to image, espe­cial­ly in TV news, where I made my liv­ing well into wrin­kles and reced­ing grey hair time. Nobody com­plained that I was by and large less than per­fect­ly groomed, refused to wear make-up for ‘on cam­eras’ and as often as not looked more like I need­ed, rather than recent­ly had a haircut.
A female col­league told me that when she was risk­ing her life report­ing from Bagh­dad, pro­duc­ers in New York bom­bard­ed her with instruc­tions on make­up and how to wear her hair. Then a female pro­duc­er told her she need­ed to look “ten per­cent less glam­orous”. What that was sup­posed to mean was nev­er made clear.
For male cor­re­spon­dents, signs of age are often seen as bestow­ing a mea­sure of grav­i­tas, a sub­lim­i­nal mes­sage that you’ve “been there and back”.
My first gray hairs appeared in 1982, when I was cov­er­ing the Israeli siege of West Beirut.
I was only 35, tech­ni­cal­ly “mid­dle-aged” if you go by the Bib­li­cal count of three score years and ten, so in a way I proved the old saw about fear turn­ing your hair white overnight.
Anoth­er male advan­tage when it comes to aging, is our innate inabil­i­ty to recog­nise when we’ve reached the stage of being hor­mon­al­ly invis­i­ble to the oppo­site sex.
While he prob­a­bly didn’t have aging in mind when he coined the phrase, the great philoso­pher Immanuel Kant summed it up in one line:
“Hap­pi­ness is not an ide­al of rea­son, but of imagination.”
That’s a (wrin­kled) high­brow way of say­ing: “Nev­er give up on the to-do list.”

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