Inner conflict

During the last week of my stay in the Alpujarras, the almond trees flowered. It happened almost overnight. There was an exceptionally warm afternoon and evening, and next morning the trees were foaming with pink and white petals, and very pretty it was, too.

The day they flowered was my birthday. To mark it, I went for a long walk in the countryside. I didn’t enjoy it. The almond blossom’s perfect newness made me jealous. At 50, it seemed to me, I had more in common with the stones under my feet than with the flowers. Fifty! Even the word seemed distasteful. To have lived for half a century somehow seemed wrong. Today, life expectancy in the world’s poorer countries is about 45. If it wasn’t for global capitalism being heavily weighted in my favour, I reasoned, and the expensive skills of my dentist, I should be brown bread by now.  

And of what use to anyone, really, is a man of 50? Apart from being available to march out and fling himself on the foe in wartime, not much, I’d say. I used to think an opportunity to make this kind of belated sacrifice was coming to my generation. Not since the Conquest, surely, has a political elite treated the English nation with such contempt. We won’t stand for this much longer, I used to think. Somebody’s going to start shooting in a minute — a saintly Yorkshireman, probably — and we’ll all be going at it hammer and tongs.

But we have stood for it. And my childhood belief that I belonged to a moral community that also happened to be a famous nation, and that one day I might be required to die for it, has almost overnight become not merely redundant, but also pernicious. How