I've made a cheering discovery at a moment in my life when I could do with one. By the time you read this I will have become 40, and I was about to begin with a statement that was found written in one of George Orwell's notebooks after his death: "At 40, everyone has the face he deserves." I rummaged through packing cases for a bit until I found out that the actual quote is: "At 50, everyone has the face he deserves." So at least I have something to look forward to. At 40, I hope I haven't got the teeth, eyes and hairline I deserve, because if so I must have done something awful.
I find it very difficult not to have panicky thoughts about being 40. To put it very crudely: at ten, you're too young to make plans. At 20, you find yourself in some area that you probably didn't choose very carefully, but it doesn't matter too much because you feel (wrongly) that you'll always have time to find the thing you want to do and do it. At 30, you have the sneaking suspicion that even though you may have watched ER and decided that it would be really good to be a doctor - that it would theoretically be possible to take some science A-levels and spend six years studying medicine - you're not going to, because it would be silly. But at 40, you start to feel that you aren't going to have time to do the things that seemed practical, that some of the things you've been "putting off" to do next year, or the year after next, you're never going to do.
Can you do anything after 40 that will make people say: "Oh, he's very young to have done that"? Sixteen is young to be a Wimbledon champion, as Boris Becker was. Seventeen is young to be as great a poet as Rimbaud. Twenty-four is young to be a prime minister, as Pitt the Younger was. Twenty-five is young to be as great a novelist as Dickens. If you become a consultant physician or a university professor or a cabinet minister in your early forties, you can still be called precocious. But after 40? You could cause some surprise by becoming Master of the Rolls or a lollipop man, but there's not much else. As an aspiring writer, I used to rate myself as being younger than Keats when he died, younger than Shelley when he died, younger than Byron when he died. I used to think of Joyce as a late developer, but he published Ulysses on his 40th birthday - the bastard. I am still, however, a year or two younger than Shakespeare was when he wrote King Lear, which isn't much of a comfort.
I recently observed to an older friend how much faster my thirties had passed than my twenties. "You wait," he said. "Your forties pass really quickly." Since we judge the passing of time according to the amount of time we have already been alive, the horrible truth of this can be demonstrated arithmetically. The next decade - a quarter of my life so far - will feel the same as 2f years does to a ten year old and as five years does to a 20 year old. Don DeLillo's novel White Noise partly concerns the attempt to invent a drug that will cure the fear of death. I'd like a drug that would cure me of my habit of making ridiculous numerical calculations of the kind I have just set out.
I was never meant to become 40. That was what happened to grown-ups of previous generations. When I look at holiday photos from about 1960, the children dressed like children while the men wore suits and ties. But I and most people I know still dress like children - jeans, T-shirts, trainers. We listen to the music we listened to when we were 14.
Admittedly we - or at least I - don't take drugs, not (heaven forbid) because there's anything morally wrong with it, but because small amounts of almost anything apart from tap water make us - or at least me - feel tired the next morning. And if you're a writer, you get older without acquiring the status and authority that better-organised professions have arranged for themselves.
But it gets harder to pretend to ignore the passing of time if you've acquired obtrusively large numbers of children and they are visibly and audibly starting to approach adolescence, a state that I entered late and never felt I properly left. I haven't even got any grey hairs yet. Well, a few have started to appear in my eyebrows, but they were obviously directed to me by mistake, and I easily remedied the error with a pair of tweezers.
