Age humbles and makes you contract your world. Where once you travelled to your network and counted yourself lucky that it spanned the globe, where once you were free and vibrant, now you’re content to run on rails, still vibrant but for shorter periods of time and you do need the toilet at hand just that little bit more.
Some people are strange and that strangeness comes from their interlinked banal experiences. You can go into Canada, America or Russia and have a banal life, going to work each day, coming home, then someone phones you and offers you more banal part time work and so it goes, layer by layer.
Friends in Britain and Australia think you have an exciting, alluring life and it is certainly varied but ultimately, it is routine, each part of it in its own way. You are a very routine person, even a little dull, once the standard dinner conversation has reached a pregnant pause and your circumspect nature threatens to silence you.
Your CV looks good until you look behind it and see that you have not surrounded yourself with the trappings of one career area – you don’t have the CELTA or CLAIT or whatever you need, you can’t speak the jargon of one career or social group. Your accent is a blend and it contains elements which annoy the person you’re with, no matter where you are.
You’re the eternal alien – everyone is a different age, both older and younger. People like you and wish you well but you’re not one of them in the end. So you settle somewhere and put roots down but ultimately it is artificial. People you know all have immediate families [your own is either deceased or dispersed] and though they accept you, [the young implicitly and quickly and the more mature with a certain friendly reservation], it always has a shelf life, as they themselves change their circumstances.
There’s no niche, there are no roots. There are all these question marks, far more mysterious and exotic in appearance than in reality. In reality, you’ve just gone from one thing to another – in your younger days a healthy thing but now a little eyebrow raising. You’ve filled out physically and you’re cast in the role of the interesting itinerant returned. Where is your wife, your family? In which box do you naturally fit?
Though possessing a keen sense of manners and even etiquette, you lack the local jargon, the local manner and some of the things you come out with, some of the expressions, for example, are from another place, maybe from Russia and Australia. People politely say nothing but inside them, they’ve concluded that you’re a bit less than respectable. You’re not ordinary in their eyes but in yours, you are. You yearn to be.
You’re turned in on yourself, no matter how expansive your real nature because you’ve been reliant on yourself so long. It’s difficult for anyone to really penetrate your persona, you’re too closed, which precludes a regular partner who wants to know every last detail and then some. You don’t want to be like this and something inside you screams, “Ask me, just ask me and I’l tell you all,” but they shy away and are too reticent to do that. Do they fear something there, some dark secret which will alter their opinion? There is nothing in there – you are just an ordinary citizen translocated.
You don’t talk much about yourself, what’s the point? This makes people all the more suspicious and by lacking some of the social lubricant which demands you fill in that space with small talk, you say nothing instead. People with egos don’t like you, deep down because you tend to speak in “I” and “me” even though you try not to. Again, you’ve been in your own world for so long that there is no choice but to speak that way.
“When I was in Thailand,” you say or even, if you were lucky at that time, “When we were in Thailand.” but no one is really interested, except to relate when they “did” Thailand, which is actually interesting to you, just as everything out there is interesting to you but in the end, you return to silence.
People eventually feel let down because the promise which was in your eyes and the pleasure you feel in their company has not produced the results they had in mind when you arrived. You say to yourself that you have little promise in you and you’ve never claimed differently but the weight of expectation from others bears down on you and they feel cheated by you and want you to just move on.
The bureaucrats and officials have a field day with you, blocking you here, stymying you there, demanding some document you don’t have in an evermore constricted state where you need to have a statistical history in one country alone to be a person – so much for the jetset. People are jealous of your travels and “exotic lifestyle” and resent your moaning about how difficult it is.
The worst of it is that the mates you’d dearly like to accept you don’t do that because theirs is a closed shop – army buddies or engineers or businessmen and though you can converse with them and share many of the same values as them, though you are almost one of them, still you fall short.
Where does it end? Hopefully by taking another woman who likes to be with you and you try to make a life, even at this late stage. It’s never too late, you anxiously hope, as your receding hair and shortness of breath tell a different tale. Anyway, you’ve probably atrophied down there by now so it would be embarrassing that your technique has got so rusty from infrequent use. What was once par for the course you now shy away from and pretend you’re not interested any more.
It becomes apparent that you need a goal. You have thoughts of joining a company and immersing yourself in their corporate structure but they take one look at you and are amazed you even thought of such a thing at this age. Someone gives you a chance and you take it.
You start a blog and think that a cool purpose in life would be to spread goodwill. Douglas Adams’ spaceman travelled from planet to planet, insulting people in alphabetical order and that’s a good purpose but spreading goodwill is ultimately more fun. You go to a shop and make an observation to the shopgirl – she likes it but the mate you’re with says, “Creep,” only half jokingly. Hell, it was true what you said. Oh well.
Your blog becomes a bit more and takes on a life of its own and the folly of humanity proves too much not to comment on, to the point people see you as so cynical. You have a penchant for losing friends but in the end, the real ones remain.
Tomorrow is another busy day, so you finish the extended rant you were writing at 01:22 because you couldn’t sleep but you need to sleep because you have another job interview.
The list had reached Fiona Jones, Piara Khabra [old age], John MacDougall, Ron Brown [age], Gwynneth Dunwoody, Rachel Squire, Terry Fields, Roger Stott, Bernie Grant and Tony Banks before I realized I'd have to leave off those who "legitimately" died of old age and its complications.
