Turning 40 is a monsoon of my own mortality

By the time you read this I will have turned 40. Forty. Up until a few days ago, 40 was just a number, plain and simple — the sort of number that followed 39 and preceded 41; the sort of number that bands from Birmingham placed after the letters ‘UB’ before recording a few reggae-based songs; the sort of number that was occasionally mentioned on the Shipping Forecast, just before Cromarty, just after Viking and Dogger. My friends had emailed or called with concern, never quite broaching the subject directly, always skirting, dancing around the inevitability of my ageing, the ‘night follows day’ reliability of my mutability. I found myself quoting Wilde, when he suggested that youth was wasted on the young. (I was too wasted when I was young to enjoy my youth.) I was chipper and upbeat, sanguine in the extreme. I was running towards 40 with a smile on my face and cheer in my heart. Then it all when Pete Tong. (I’m entitled to use colloquialisms like that while I desperately cling on to the last few days and hours of my thirties.)

I know exactly when it happened, exactly when the boat that is my life started to capsize. I was chatting (urbanely) to this beautiful, flirty filament of femininity. I was at one with the three-headed god of charm, elegance and wit. While I topped up her glass with yet more Veuve, she made reference to a song that was her guilty pleasure de jour. (For those for whom detail is everything, the song in question is the questionable New Wave Italian pop sensation of 1985, Baltimora with their kitsch and camp classic ‘Tarzan Boy’.) I laughed debonairly. ‘I remember that! What a terrible song. The Eighties is the decade that time should really have forgotten.