October 08, 2005
40. hmm.......sounds like 36? 32? 29? do you take Visa?
Somehow, I managed to turn 40 a few weeks ago. More than a month ago actually. (Doesn't time fly when you're having fun.........)
The day itself was painless enough. We arrived at breakfast on the terrace of our hotel in Turkey, the one where we sat looking out over the Aegean and Rhodes, (just thought i'd throw that in...) to discover a bouquet of flowers from the garden and an enormous cake cook had whipped up for me. The other guests burst into a spontaneous-and-slightly-embarrasing-but-very-sweet rendition of Happy Birthday, I was congratulated in German, Dutch, English and Turkish and Jacob did a little dance.
After climbing up through the lower regions of Baba Dag to Kilim along the Lycian Way we spent the afternoon swimming before dining on our terrace, accompanied again by the Aegean and Rhodes but with the addition of a bottle of Turkish bubbly.
One advantage of drifting along on the tailcoats of the notorious baby-boomers is that by the time you reach any significant milestones in the age-stakes most of them have been there a good decade before you and wrenched it from sensible/dowdy/middle-aged/grown-up or whatever association it had that you weren't looking forward to and created a whole new set, usually revolving around youth, vitality and shopping.
These new associations are not without their own problems, the crap-exponent seems to get higher with the years, but what is handy is the 'loosening' of ideas that happens. By ditching one set of ideas and introducing another, or several, it becomes much easier to imagine yourself as something other than what someone who turned 40 might have been expected to imagine themselves to be, say, 40 years ago. There have always been people with the fortitude to ignore cultural regulations and stigmatisations but now it's easier than ever with the babyboomers conveniently muddying the waters before you step gingerley into the pool.
And thus, turning 40 has been reasonably painless, more than anyhting its feels like some universal practical joke. Just not quite sure who it's directed at yet?
Posted by Faith | TrackBack