[ageing] gracefully or disgracefully

My younger girlfriend and I brought up the topic in 2000 when we were planning to marry.

I said that if something happened and we didn't marry and if we actually parted, then she'd have been my last girlfriend. Rubbish, she said and she was arguing from what she'd observed but she wasn't counting on the `'flirt but that's all" philosophy.

She once said it was impossible to just "go out" in this country, "one-on-one "- by definition it meant far more and a man buying you a meal was tantamount to the sack.

My time with her brought three things home:

1. Many girls do, whatever you say and however you are outraged by this, bring it on themselves. Provocative dress, highlighted beauty and a roving eye do attract the men like flies [and I mean men in her case, not boys]. She was a man's girl.

She thought it was a great compliment to me that I was able to hold onto such enticing beauty which she devoted all her waking hours to. I thought it was a pain in the butt to be constantly fighting off a steady stream of men until I realized that she could have ended most of it with a certain attitude, a certain way she carried herself, if she'd wanged to, that is.

2. For my part, it was a strange state of mind. Post boomer but early Gen X, I really wasn't attempting to stay young; I wasn't attempting anything - one doesn't in the middle of living life to the full - reflection comes later.

In Northern England, one sweet lass of 17 asked me why I was "trying to dress young". It was a shock, that comment. I hadn't thought that I was dressing young; perhaps it was that I had aged beneath it. If pressed, I'd have said I was trying to dress with a bit of style. It was just that I knew some people who sold Sonetti gear and I liked it very much, including a jacket which was eye burning on one side but reversed to Italian treated silk on the other.

Immediately reversing the jacket to it's less outrageous side, that was the start of dressing more appropriately. One of the first steps was to discard the trainers/sneakers for leather shoes and Higham had now moved into a new phase.

I really do think that some things look ridiculous [in the full sense of the word] on certain ages and with certain degrees of hair remaining on top. Even posture does alter, no matter how gradual it becomes, a paunch is unavoidable and takes longer and longer hours to quell in the gym and the skin gets softer and less elastic as you go on - training, cosmetics and botox notwithstanding.

3. Age can't be disguised, certainly from a younger person and to rage against age and spend the hard-earned trying to reverse the process is stupid. Having done botox once in recent years, I can't think why I was so stupid at the time; I'm now dead against botox - think you should just be yourself and attract those of a certain age, forgetting the younger set.

But there's something psychological, powerful, refusing to let your mind come to terms with age - it's a state of mind beyond reason, tying in vanity and who knows what else. That there are girls who also ignore the obvious in a man for their own reasons [or perhaps they don't reason it out] - that makes it all the more difficult. Especially when they are all around us.

Men bemoaning how they no longer attract the "prize" young lady should count their blessings. What have we got to offer a young lady anyway, apart from money [and don't say it's our loving heart]? Methinks it's more difficult for the ex-motorcycle rider, the ex-Lothario, the ex-everything, to come to terms with reality - Pierce Brosnan springs to mind.

And yet we look across at others of our age, also coming to terms with it all and don't wish to see a mirror image of ourselves ageing - so our eyes sub-consciously filter through only younger people and somehow rationalize that those younger people are going to be remotely interested in us. But strangely, there is a grain of truth in it - the less interest we show in them, the more it seems to attract them.

But we need to think it through. For what to go around with a younger person? Maturity and wisdom can only be taken so far and then it begins to look increasingly ludicrous - unless we're wearing Armani, it looks pointless. We can't cut it in the sack to the same extent - we just can't and our whole mindset and bodyset are different. Young people bounce, we glide or stumble. They like us but they're not hot for us. It's a zero sum game. Besides, they've their own agenda in life and ours is different for our last few [mobile] decades.

Drawing it together, perhaps we should pitch ourselves just a few years short of our true age and get the best of both worlds. That's the age anyway, from where our partner should be coming from. As for many younger people's constant desire to put the older in their boxes on the shelf - the "your time is over" syndrome - that's equally ridiculous.

These days the 70 year old is going to rage far into the night and why not? If you have the energy, why not? Why allow yourself to be put out to pasture? As long as you're not trying to cut it with younger folk, what's the problem?

Attention from someone younger then becomes a nice little compliment, rather than anything to be taken up.

Have a lovely Friday.