11 June 2025

Egad, I am now so old I remember hat sizes

And use words like egad.

Photo by Tim Robinson/Millennium Images

I had another one of those birthdays the other day. It was a small and pleasant affair, held as per usual in the garden of the Battle of Trafalgar. Two of the children came down from London (the third is in the Far East, so he has an excuse) and the evening was made quorate by a posse of most of my Brighton friends. One of them has moved to Hebden Bridge and was much missed, for she tends to turn up with a bunch of young poetry students and this always amuses me because my children become outraged that they are not the youngest people there. Of course, having youngsters around puts my own advanced age into sharp relief, but on the whole I like them because for some reason the young like me.

I used to think I didn’t like kids until the time I went on holiday to Canada – good God, imagine having enough money to fly to Canada – and went on a weekend with our host’s sister and nephew, an eight-year-old child who kept asking questions I didn’t find irritating, which for reasons to this day I do not understand. They were largely historical in nature and despite not having even an O-level in the subject I answered them well enough, certainly to his satisfaction, and he coined the nickname for me of “Mr History”, which I found incredibly gratifying. (Even more gratifyingly, he grew up and attained a doctorate in the stuff, which I suppose makes him Doctor History.)

But no youngsters this time, and as my eldest is now 30, I can’t even call my kids young any more. When I was my youngest child’s age, I had already moved in with his mother-to-be, and by the time I was my eldest’s age, I had got round to marrying her, and had had a party which entered legend and nearly resulted in my former director of studies losing his tenure, it was that debauched. And, by an irony of fate, yesterday I posted the last bit of paperwork that is needed in order to get a divorce. So yes, nearly 18 years after we separated. We could have inserted a child now of voting age into that gap.

Anyway ladies, I am now on the market again, although actually I am not. I have done the thought experiment of sliding into a relationship again and I just can’t see it working out. I have gone too feral, if someone who is mostly in bed all day can be called feral. I am too set in my ways now and I can be fun for an evening or two, but as a permanent houseguest maybe not so much.

I do not mind this at all, although right now I am in the second day of an illness whose symptoms are vaguely to do with feeling nauseated and trembly but for once have nothing to do with a hangover. It is probably something to do with my great age, or ancience, as I have decided to start calling it. “Ancience” is a word I invented the other night and I really think it ought to exist, in the way that we get “patience” from “patient”. Why is “ancience” not a word until now, and can I claim copyright on it, as I did with the concept of a TV show based on Bark in the Park last week? But leaving all that aside, it would be nice to have someone bringing me cups of tea and maybe a plate of Hobnobs and take me to the doctors’ if things get worse.

Actually the doctors have been trying to get hold of me, because they are very keen on seeing how my chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is holding up. Very well, thank you: my COPD is thriving. So much so that when I lost my steroid inhaler, I had to call them up for an emergency replacement. Of course, as soon as I arranged this it turned up again, and I had to explain what had happened. I was groping for a metaphor and was about to say it’s like how you light a fag in order to make the bus come sooner, but then thought better of it as it’s not the most appropriate circumstance to think of when your lungs are shot and you’re talking to your GP’s receptionist.

But egad, I am getting old. I use the word “egad” for a start. I remember hat sizes, for goodness sake. Does anyone use them any more? They’re all adjustable these days unless you’re getting a proper one and I’m not doing that in a hurry unless I want to remind people of George Galloway. I remember peering into my school cap and wondering whether 7 1/8 was good or bad, and what bearing it had on reality. My shoe sizes never went into eighths.

I wonder whether this current malady is the harbinger of a deeper disaster. Unusually, my second day of illness has been worse than my first, and this could be a sign of the beginning of the end, all the result of my 60-odd winters on this planet. “Ah, no; the years O!/How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!” as Thomas Hardy put it in “During Wind and Rain”, and I wonder if he was younger than me when he wrote it. Everyone’s younger than me these days. I see photos on social media platforms under titles like “Scenes from Britain’s Unimaginable Past” and I think: Christ, I was alive then. So it would seem that I am now, in a very literal sense of the term, Mr History. Go on, ask me anything.

[See also: Reform needs Zia Yusuf]