So I got another pet. Another one, I hear my inner homemaker complain. You realise that you have too many pets when you start jigsaw-puzzling their names. I’m now confusing the name of the half-a-kilo kitten with that of the 50-kilo dog. Two of the cats have new names – their colour – as I cannot remember what I had originally called them. The birds – actually, I don’t call the birds anything except family-unfriendly names. They wake me up at 4:30am with their amateurish re-enactment of Hitchcock’s The Birds. And the old cat – the pater familias – is now called Daisy. He doesn’t care anyway – he’s so old that he once belonged to a homo neanderthalensis.
Ah, old age. One moment, you’re thinking that age will not wither you and that you stand a good chance of living forever, and the next, you’re looking at a kitten and thinking how it can still remember its 36-week birthday, while for you, your 36-year birthday is a foggy haze. Time goes by so slowly, sang Madonna, she with the fibularis longus of a woman half her age. Well, Ms Ciccone, you think that time goes by so slowly, but it actually doesn’t. It’s like an octogenarian’s hand moving towards a random item on a buffet table. You think the hand will never reach the grasp, but you look away for one second, then look back again, and the cucumber sandwiches are all gone.
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road- American author Stewart Brand
A study by the Spire Bristol Hospital, UK, has concluded that at 36, you realise that you will not live forever. At 36, you are at life’s crossroads: you either turn left and continue in your hedonistic ways, or turn right and start acknowledging that you cannot stay up late and wake up at five in the morning as if nothing had happened. That you cannot stay at the office until 10 at night and then go out straight after. That your metabolism cannot crush three-in-the-morning hotdogs as it once used to with impunity.
Age 36 is a defining moment. You’re not getting old – you are old. Well, at least, older than most people in the room. That research probe, the Philae, which just touched down on a comet around half a billion kilometres from Earth – you actually remember its launch 10 years ago. Your colleagues, on the other hand, were still in primary school.
And yet, being 36 is not the end. True, you actually start honouring your gym membership. And you’ve learnt to say no to second helpings. You’ve made your will and no longer think about what you will do when you grow up because, well, you have grown up. But, based on the average lifespan, you still have another half of the game to play. You can still keep up to date with fashion and know that chunky knits are very in right now. You can still use the latest technology. You’re like your two-year-old computer (two years being the computer-years equivalent of 36 human years it still works, it still plays, but every once in a while, give it a break.
techeditor@timesofmalta.com