60? It Ain't No Thing.

I made a Big Deal about my 60th birthday, and I’d been making a big deal of it in my head for a few months before that. I thought when I got to 60, I’d be “done” somehow. I would have "made it”, “arrived”, “finished the race”, some damn metaphor with a hint of a promise of ease in it, anyway. Hell, I even considered getting ink, because all the other advice I’d been given back when I got the “don’t get a tattoo” advice turned out to be worthless junk. I didn’t do get the ink, but only because I couldn’t think of something that I would like.

Of course I still have to show up at work, even though I’ve passed the (now optional) retirement age, because my pensions aren’t worth pigeon-crap, and anyway, where else am I going to be surrounded by reasonably attractive women in their mid-20’s - early-30’s?

Turns out that 60 is symbolic of precisely nothing. 20 is the end of your teens; 30 the end of your future; 40 is when you notice you get tired more easily and recover more slowly; 50 is when you notice you have put on a lot of weight. 60 means nothing. It’s either 50 all over again, or it’s just one more day in the continuing fight against weight gain, tiredness, debt, boredom, and housework, a fight you realised some time in your fifties that for your self-respect you had to take on.

The rules changed. Back when who cares, at 60 we could start “Growing old gracefully”. That meant slowing down, putting on weight, no longer trying to figure out what the kids saw in the latest crooners, and spending more time in the garden and on some obscure local committee. It meant slowly disengaging from the mainstream world. If you had a big fat final salary pension from the Government or a previously nationalised industry, you could sod off on cruises and holidays all the time. No-one now has final salary pensions, and as for “growing old gracefully”? Not so much.

Our pensions are worth nothing, so we have to carry on working. And not in the back of the supermarket either. Mainstream work. Where the superior education and grounding in the fundamentals we got at proper schools give us - still! - an advantage over all but the smartest of the kids. It’s not acceptable to put on weight, lose muscle tone, wallow in bygone pop culture, decry the changing world, or dress shabbily.

“Growing old gracefully” might mean lifting less at the end of the year than at the start, but we’re still going to be lifting. We don’t have to know what’s in the pop charts, but we still keep discovering new music (or old music for the first time). The same goes for movies, fiction, philosophy, history, art and whatever else. We have to keep on learning work-related skills, partly to stay ahead of the kids, and because that’s what people who respect their skills do. I don’t keep up with the latest social networking apps, but I do keep up with the software I use to do what I do. A cute early-twenty-something at work said, as part of a discussion about age eligibility for our products “60 isn’t old anymore”.

Well, she’s half-right. Turns out 60 isn’t old for me. But then I’m still working in a mainstream job, with bright peppy kids half my age, and they think I’m some kind of guru. There are men twenty years younger in worse physical condition lifting less than me in my gym. I can get away with wearing closer-cut clothes than almost all men of my age. And of course, I’m single, and live alone. This is much better at sixty than your forty-year-old self thinks it will be. In fact, it’s close to awesome - or it can be, WHEN I make good use of it.

The Great Kitchen Re-Furbishment Project

When I bought the house, the kitchen hadn't been changed since the mid-1930's when the house was built. I had a new one installed in the late 1980's and lived with it ever since, changing the appliances now and again. This year I decided it was time to re-do the whole thing. I wanted the red lino off the floor and the floorboards taken back to their original colour and varnished, and whatever it was I wanted NO cabinets. As you can see, I'd started to go for the open look before the refurb, in a fit of something or other.

So from the old to

... cleared out Sunday evening for the fitters...

...to remove everything...

...so the floor men could do this...

...and when it had dried, the fitters came back to do this...

...but notice the lack of decorating touches...

...which were put added by decorators...

From start to finish took two calendar week's work for two men each. The accuracy with which the fitter put up the shelves and Spur railing was amazing: they are perfectly straight. The dark wood top sets off everything put on it far better than the original light colour. I'm getting used to working in it, and stocking up the shelves with decorative food. This is basically where this year's holidays went.

What AA Gill Said

Sometimes someone else says exactly what you haven't quite allowed yourself to think. This is AA Gill in a recent article...

"And I realise with a sudden shock that I’m probably too old to sleep with anyone for the first time. The thought of having to go through the whole seduction, will they, won’t they, can I, can’t I, is far more terrifying than it is exciting."

I've been rationalising round that one for quite a while. I couldn't say the word "terrifying". I couldn't recognise that the awful ambiguity and uncertainty and potential for disappointment and embarrassment was so daunting. Which is what he said.

And now I know the enemy. Not fear, but uncertainty. Which is no greater at my age than it was when I was forty.

And AA Gill may be the only man in London who looks less my age than I do. 

June 2014 Review

Did June happen? My diary has things in it but I can’t recall that it was anything special or that I enjoyed it. I was tired, which was why I took a week off that didn’t really refresh me at all: no more than six hours’ sleep a night. All I want to do on a holiday is sleep. Eight hours minimum, ten for preference.

I saw Sexy Beast on Curzon At Home; Edge of Tomorrown and 3 Days To Kill at Cineworld; Fruitvale Station and Frank at the Curzon Soho. A few more episodes of the Inspector Montalbano were tucked under the belt as well. I read Big Data by Victor Meyer-Schoneberger, The Anatomy of Violence by Adrian Raine, Why Is There A Philosophy of Mathematics At All? by Ina Hacking, Love and Math by Edward Frenkel, and made a start on Peter Robb’s A Street Fight In Naples.

The family had lunch at the Ritz for Mother’s birthday on a Saturday. The food is good for a London brasserie, though not one-star, and the decor exactly as awful as you imagine. It’s way too formal for anyone to actually have, you know, fun, there. Sis and I went down the far end of the Kings Road to Medlar, which had better food and decor. Though it was mid-week, every bar and restaurant at that end was packed, and everyone looked as though they were having fun.

The Girls and I had supper in Soho mid-month and they came over to my place on the last Saturday of the month to see my new kitchen and have lunch: tilapia and salad; chicken Fiorentina; chorizo with butter bean stew. All from the Leith’s recipe book they bought me for my birthday. (Big Ahhhhhhh).

During the holiday I had a full-service medical from the GP at my gym - blood tests, urine tests, ECG, breathing, body-fat, and the bit where he checks for prostate cancer. My pulse was 60, blood pressure 122 / 82, chemicals were fine except high LDH, and my testosterone levels were middling. Not low, but not raging either. I was 95kgs for the medical and that’s too high. I need to lose about a stone, and much of that in body fat.

My exercise routine was a mess. I managed to get back up to 3x10x60kgs on the bench, which is the basic level for someone with actual testicles and an office job. I missed classes and felt uninspired.

So I’m now the possessor of a FitBit One. I am becoming a Quantified Person. More on that later.

Frank: The Movie

I have no idea how anyone writes songs. I can extemporise instrumental music on the guitar, piano and recorder; I can write plays, have written poems and stories; I have a glimpse at what creative mathematics and philosophy are about; I take reasonable photographs and can put together a meal from whatever’s in the kitchen. But I have NO IDEA how Curt Cobain wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit.



None. Can’t fathom it. (I can pick up a guitar and "just play" something. Improvisation / extemporisation I can do: song-writing? Composing to order? Not a hope.)

The pianist in Frank could be me - except he can do social media better than I can’t at all, and gets to make hay with a girl who looks just like Maggie Gyllenhall. It has the funniest joke I’ve heard all year

“I play keyboards”
“Can you play C, F and G?”
“Yes”
“You’re in”

I rolled in the aisle.

Frank is sold as a comedy, and who knows it may even have been written and performed as one. But inside it is a portrayal of the creative process and people. The key scene, the one that tells you that Frank and his weird band are actually the real thing, is right at the end. (Spoiler alert). Robbed of his papier-mâché head, revealed as the grown-up version of the troubled child that he was, he walks into the dingy bar his band have a gig at - playing to four people who can’t hear them. Frank looks around and picks features of the room and starts to recite them, which turns into a kind of chorus, which the band pick up on and within three choruses are in full flight, at once backing and soloing over Frank’s song. And it’s good, for its genre. Jam and Lewis it ain’t, but if you’re into that stuff, you’ll know it’s good. (it’s not great, but it’s good.) It’s better than I could do.

And in the meantime, our narrator, who fell in with them by accident, promoted them through You Tube and Twitter, and fails to write a single worthwhile bar of music throughout the movie, leaves, having understood that he’s not a creative musician, but at best a guy who knows when to play C, F and G.

The process that the movie shows us is hermetic (the band don’t want to be a success, and two of them only speak French), obsessive (they take nearly a year to prepare an album that never gets released), and quirky (scenes of recording natural noises and other things). That’s one way of creating ideas and music, but it’s not the only one. At the other extreme is what the great jazz musicians did: play all the time, listen to other people when you’re not playing, and keep experimenting with changes. What happens if we do this, or that? What happens when I get three of the greatest improvising musicians in history in a church and give them some chords to work off? (Hint: Kind of Blue. We just didn’t know that Coltrane, Adderley and Evans were that good then.)



Frank suggests that creative people are odd if not actually weird, and that’s a common enough idea, but it’s an excuse. For the audience. Creativity takes knowledge, skill and application, the willingness to experiment and be wrong, and, of course, a lot of familiarity with what others are doing. It’s hard work and requires a certain amount of single-mindedness, or a lot of opportunities to experiment (as in “I thought I’d try putting prunes in the stew this time”). That’s not likely for people whose time fritters away on conference calls, meetings, making up slide decks, BS-ing in the pub, zoning out on the train and “dealing” with other peoples’ insecurities and neediness. But creative people spend more time futzing, going down blind alleys and pursuing impossible pet projects than anyone thinks.

One thing the movie is pretty darn clear about. It’s better to be the band playing doleful versions of cowboys songs in a nowhere bar than it is to be the people drinking at the bar. Or the piano player who brings the band-leader back to join them. And with that, I do not disagree.

Four Days in the Netherlands: A Walk Round Utrecht

Utrecht has a university, where Nobel Prizewinner Gerard t’Hooft is a professor, and a number of parks and canals which make a very pleasant circular walk to pass the middle of Sunday, stopping at the Louis Hartlooper Complex for lunch and returning via the town centre.

Four Days in the Netherlands: The Amsterdam-Rhine Canal

The Netherlands is about canals. These are not cute, narrow English canals with houseboats that used to carry a few tons of china clay, salt or pottery about the place. These are wide and deep and look more like rivers and very large specialised low cargo ships with big engines and the Captain’s 4x4 on the roof and a couple of hundred tons of something bulky, proceeding at a decent clip. These are serious industrial canals for a serious industrial economy.

The top two photographs are of the same freighter. That's how big those things are.

The canal is on the right of the train (going away from Amsterdam) until a few miles outside Utrecht when it turns south towards the Rhine. So that's a canal in the bottom photograph, not an actual river.