This week, my birthday is looming over the horizon like a supertanker with a cargo of pipes and slippers, and apparently, I am over the hill . According to a female friend, I am also on the shelf . Any bloke over the age of of 33 should avoided like the plague, she sensitively observed the other day.
He s probably got pyschological issues . Rather than sink into deep depression about all this, it spurred me into formulating a new idea for a Channel 4 TV Show - Ten Years Older . Nicky Hambleton-Jones, I firmly believe, has got it all wrong.
While her Ten Years Younger show may work miracles in making women look thinner and prettier and who could possibly object to that? - it goes disastrously awry when she turns her attention to men. Typically, she will pick on some poor chap, surgically remove his rugged, lived-in sense of self - precisely the thing that makes him attractive and then metrosexualise him into some pompadoured, insecure wannabe teenager in achingly hip threads and a try-hard haircut, a process akin to transforming Oliver Reed into Li l Chris.
The fact is Ms Hambleton-Jones needs to be offering a service which is the exact opposite, because the sexual markplace of London, older men have the guile and experience that younger men do not. Meanwhile, they also possess everything that women claim to crave: self-esteem, better taste in shoes and endurance (by which I mean something thilling than more marathon running). Put it this way CD sales show that the gnarled grandads of Take That are only just entering their peak popularity.
Personally I used to agonise over the ageing process and about not hitting the traditional life-plan targets, deadlines and milestones cohabition, marriage, kid, more kids - by a certain birthdays. It used to bug me that friends in couples would peel off into wedlock two-by two, renounce anything more bracing than Jamie Oliver recipes and begin acting like their grandparents, leaving me marrooned on a lonely low tide of solo socialising. When I abruptly found myself single at the age of 28 after a long relationship, I decided it was time deal with my commitmentphobia once and for all and begin acting my age.
I then did what all rational men do and started acting half my age, throwing myself into the mindless hedonism, inconsquential sex and emotional turmoil that pave the way to some kind of elightenment. When I got to 30 when I realised that age in a man is an achievement rather than a loss, meaning there is no hurry to cram everything into your twenties. Indeed, in other eras it was considered foolhardy for a man to throw it all in before he hit 40, let alone 30.
Either way, when you re north of your twenties, all those self-made rules and anxieties above disappear into a big puff of whatever - a good thing because deadlines are often exactly what doom new relationships to failure. Admittedly, the ageing process is kinder to men than to women, because blokes aren't in a race against their own fertility from the moment they first get funny feelings about Blue Peter presenters. But the real defence of growing old disgracefully is that age in a man actually increases, rather than reduces his pool of potential dates and partners.
Thirty eight-year-old women can miraculously seem as attractive as 22-year-olds (I have examined this issue in great detail). At the risk of sounding like to sounds like an emotional retard suffering from arrested development, I believe that nothing prematurely ages a man so much as acting his own age and that in the end, you re only as old as the person you feel. Ideally, someone ten years younger than you are.
This week, my birthday is looming over the horizon like a supertanker with a cargo of pipes and slippers, and apparently, I am over the hill .
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