The imminent arrival of a new decade has got me thinking of the last three times I hit a big something-zero.
I was very excited about reaching 10. I can remember walking down a road in Cheddar and proudly commenting to an adult I was with (I can't recall who) that I was about to reach double figures. Back then getting older was exciting, pushing one closer to a time when you'd be able to do cool more grown-up stuff. Who wouldn't hate being a kid, when this exhilarating, secret adult word was edging ever nearer. For some reason when I think of being 10, I think of myself in my cub uniform, my chest puffed out in pride at my part in this junior paramilitary movement, my shoes polished. I was such a little creepy swot, a literal goody-two-shoes, working hard at school, trying to impress adults - not to say I didn't have my moments of cheekiness and naughtiness, but there I was. Ten, pleased not to be in single figures. A cub. I wonder if I will be as proud to get into triple figures - I feel it's unlikely that I will get to find out.
I can't remember my 20th birthday at all. I don't know if I didn't find it significant or maybe I just got too drunk. I can't imagine that I didn't think I was getting stupidly old. At the age of 20 you seem to think that life is nearly over and that marriage and responsibility and kids are only three or four years away. Well I got that wrong. But I was, I believe, up in Edinburgh for my 20th. It was my first Fringe and I was with the Oxford Theatre Group sleeping in the Masonic lodge,
as I recently mentioned and we went up to Scotland a month early to do all our rehearsals, I suppose because it made it easier and cheaper to have 50 students all in one place. So I think we'd have been up there on July 12th, though I might be wrong as the Fringe started a bit later back then. I really don't recall what we did at all though. I remember my 19th birthday, when I was in California doing Camp America and got handcuffed to a flagpole and I remember my 21st, when the Oxford Revue were playing Cambridge and we drank Newcastle Brown Ale in one of the colleges after our dress rehearsal and stole some signs from our rival University (prying them off the wall - idiots). But my 20th clearly meant little to me. I may try and find my old diaries and see if they illuminate anything, though I think I stopped doing them once I got to University.
I think I dreaded turning 30 more than I am dreading turning 40, at least it seemed to preoccupy me for months before it happened. Aside from having to write a show about turning 40 it hasn't taken over my life in the same way. I have been busy and it's only in the last couple of weeks that I have started to feel slightly sickened by the concept. But I think the 30s seemed much more monumental to a man in his 20s. I had a party at Goblins, the eccentric wine bar that we used to frequent back in those glory days in Balham. It was good to have a local, where everyone knew your name and Dave and Shiela laid on a buffet for us and I got all my friends together and had a good night. A couple of my friends met for the first time at that party and got together and they are still with each other now and have a small child, so some good came from it all. There were a few parties down there in the mid to late 90s, so they all blend into one a bit.
All my worries about being in my 30s evaporated as soon as they had arrived. I enjoyed them a lot more than my 20s. I didn't really like my 20s, but once you're in your 30s you can be more who you really are.
In some ways that feels like a long time ago, but in others the last ten years have gone pretty quickly.
So hopefully these last minute jitters will pass once the big day has come and gone. Life begins at 40 after all, but maybe it just seems like that because your brain is so raddled with dementia that you can't recall anything that has happened before. Which this entry seems to confirm. I think in three days it is likely that these fleeting reminiscences will be gone too.
