Getting Older

I had a weird thought this morning.  Okay, this happens quite a lot to me, but this one actually prompted a blog.  The thought was this: I compared an average life span of say 80 years to a calendar year.  It occurred to me on this basis, that I was in June.  That's an odd thought, but not an unpleasant one.

Then I decided to be a bit more precise about this.  If we take a good life span as 85 years, and spread that across the year, I'm actually on 29 June (day 180 of the 365 of the year).  My Mutti is on 5 October.  My boyfriend (still unacceptably young) is about to burst into blossom.  He's on 31 March.  But here I am, in the "summer of my years".

Hitting 40

Like everyone I have fretted about my age at various times.  I remember thinking that I wanted to stop the clock forever at 24: the perfect age.  30 is of course a big milestone, though to be honest it wasn't one that bothered me particularly.  40, hung over me, however, like a giant circling vulture looking for a tasty sheep carcass to feed on.  From every birthday 35 onwards I feared it's approach.

For a gay man 40 is particularly significant, you see.  In "gay years" (akin to dog years) you're dead at 30.  At 40 you're a zombie, who has been dead, buried, exhumed and then cremated.  So in fact you're zombie ashes.  You don't really exist.  At least that's the perceived wisdom out there.  When I got to 40, was I bothered?  No, it was wonderfully liberating to stop worrying about it.  I just thought "meh, I look great, feel great and who cares".  And of course shortly afterwards I met my devastatingly dashing boyfriend just to prove what nonsense all of this is.

Celebrate Every Stage

Every stage of my life has had something wonderful to commend it.  I had the most ridiculously fortunate, happy childhood.  I was nicknamed the "Cheshire Cat" because I permanently had a happy grin on my face.  It was a childhood full of love and joy and huge amounts of travel.  We moved house 12 times in my first 12 years and I'd been to 20 odd countries by the time I was seven.  Being an "army brat" meant for me that my family was a constant source of stability, and we were used to being outgoing, making friends rapidly and settling in quickly.

Cheshire Cat (Centre). Ugly/Annoying big bros (R/L)

Let's skip over my teen period, because let's face it no one wants to hear about living in a bungalow in Cowplain (aka "Cowpat") in Hampshire and being a spotty youth who spent hours torturing himself over being gay.  I soon snapped out of that, and from sixth form onwards things improved rapidly. 

University (Cambridge: get me, first from Cowpat Comprehensive to get in!) and law school were all good, with loads more travel at every opportunity.  I found the constant moving of my things in and out of rooms frustrating though and longed for a place to call my own.  That came when I moved to London, my first proper job in a big law firm, and moving in with my then boyfriend.  I could start to put down roots, and it felt fantastic!

Living in Amsterdam, late 20s

Since then, well things have just got better and better, despite some bumps along the way.  I'd say I've never been happier than right now.  It's the summer of my life: the garden is planted, it's coming into full bloom and life will pan out (baring any unexpected disasters) on the course that all that hard work in the earlier months of the year have set out.  All the angst of wondering what I will do, where I will be etc are long gone.  I'm blessed to be incredibly healthy and I take good care of myself.  I'm materially well off, and I'm so lucky to be able to travel crazy amounts still.

I've experienced people I've loved dying and this was not something I'd known before.  Even people of my own age or younger, which is a huge shock to the system, and truly brings home the reality of mortality.  Of course there might be storms and dark, frightening times (who knows what lies round the corner), but in general there should be long, light, sunny days to look forward to for many months to come.  Late June is a great time of year!

Enjoying summer! Me with my loved ones

Time Speeds Up

Life definitely speeds up as we get older.  At least our perception of it certainly does.  Apparently it's to do with new experiences: if we want to "slow time down" we should expose ourselves to new things.  If you're doing things you're not used to, time seems to pass more slowly.  I was thinking about one day I had on holiday in Switzerland recently: we packed an impossible amount of things into one single day (a cable car, scooter bikes, driving along lakes, husky trekking and fondue on a mountainside) and I remember virtually every minute.  I compare that to one day at the office, when week after week merges together and I can't remember a single thing that stands out.  

Where there is monotony, contrary to what you might instinctively think, the years fly by.  Consider it this way: when you were 7, a year seemed an incredibly long period of time.  Everything was new and fresh, and you perceived it in a different way, full of exploration.  Nowadays the months merge into each other and the years "fly by" - unless you're doing lots of new things and trying out experiences you never have before.  If you've been on a long motorway journey it can seem to go on forever, but often when you arrive you can't remember any of it.  Apparently we go into a different type of consciousness (similar to a trance) and that's why we don't register the time in the same way.

In any case, doing new things is apparently how to slow time down, if you wish to.  If you're used to lots of travel and each trip merges into the next, do something different for a change.  I went on "Go Ape" recently: where I was hanging from a zip wire up trees in Thetford Forest for 3 hours.  It was amazing and something I'd never done before.  Again, I remember every minute of it.  If you're used to hanging from trees, go the theatre.  If you go to the theatre weekly, take a Japanese cookery course.  Etc.

Autumn and Winter

My summer will eventually come to and end, and autumn will loom.   What's the point in regretting that you're no longer as young as you were?  Autumn offers warm evenings in front of the fire, interspersed with still many sunny days, and perhaps changing the pace of what I do.  I have a feeling I'll be just as happy then as I was then.  Perhaps I'm essentially just a dog (click on the link for an explanation) and every time of life is my "favourite thing".  It's not a bad philosophy.

Winter will follow, and there's no changing that.  Winter too has much to commend it.  There is nothing more certain than the cycle of the calendar year, and the fact life will at some point end for us all.   If you make it to the end of December I think it's fair to acknowledge that this is of itself a wonderful blessing, and far from everyone has this opportunity.

Oscar (11) is nearing his winter days. What a great life he's had.

So, whatever date you are on in your life (see below), I hope it's a good one for you.  There's no winding the clock back, and gay boys... you don't die at 40, or even 30.  There IS life after death!

Peter x






To find out your day, divide your age by 85.  Then multiply the result by 365.  Google for example "200 day of the year" and the exact day will appear as a result. 

Worries and Problems

I've had a bit of a tough week on a personal level.  Typing this is slow and it hurts.  It's nothing by millions of people's standards, but more on that in a bit. 

Viktor Klemperer

First a line or two about Viktor Klemperer. He was a German Jew, a professor at the University of Dresden.  He wrote the only known complete diary of a German Jew through the Third Reich.  In total, his published diaries span 1933 to 1959.  I read them 15 years back and still think often about things I learned from them.  He wrote the wonderful line: "I am German.  The others are un-German".  Here is an article with more about him if you're interested.  The diaries are long, but lucid, superbly observant, and fascinating.

The diaries are also unique for several reasons.  They were written without the "benefit of hindsight".  He describes the coming to power of the Nazis alongside his ordinary life.  He doesn't have a clue what is coming next.  When he writes in 1942 about having heard of a work camp in the East called Auschwitz, where "conditions are terrible and life expectancy is short", it offers valuable insight into contemporary levels of knowledge.  There's great debate about how much people of the time knew: here was at least one man with his ear to the ground, a great personal interest, with no contemplation of the industrial evil of the gas chambers.

Professor Viktor Klemperer

In any case, leaving aside the history, Klemperer is a highly-strung, slightly pessimistic worrier.  The political situation is very much in the background of his life at first.  Just like any of us, he has other more mundane concerns.  He worries about the little house he and his wife are building.  After the initial excitement of buying it and driving on the Autobahn, he worries about the cost of running his new Opel car.  He worries about his academic work and job at the university.  Then his worries become very much more immediate: he is dismissed from his position.  He is banned from parks, cinemas, theatres.  The war breaks out.  He and Eva have to give up their beloved cat, and then their home.  They move to a "Jew's House" in Dresden.  Their friends start being "resettled" in the East.  It is terrifying to observe from the eyes of someone at the time.

As the outside situation gets more and more dreadful, a lightness enters Klemperer's writing.  He is alive and is consciously glad to be alive.  He takes each day as it comes, and it is precious.  He is spared right through until 1945 from deportation because his wife is non-Jewish and because he is a WW1 veteran.  Finally as part of a last frenzy of murdering by the Nazis, on 15 February, he is due to be deported.  On 14 February the Allies bomb Dresden (incidentally killing 50 of the 150 remaining Jews of the city).  He tears the yellow star from his jacket, destroys his identity papers, and joins the lines of refugees and lives out the war in hiding.  The second volume of his diaries end with his triumphant return to his little house with his wife, after the war.

In many respects I wish I had never read the third volume of his diaries.  Klemperer has survived the Nazi regime.  He has his home back.  He is reinstated to his job.  He is made a senator in the newly founded German Democratic Republic.  His happiness seems to last a few months, however, before the old worries start again along with the deep personal doubts and insecurity.  Rapidly the "heaviness" in his writing resurfaces.

He is just human, like all of us, but I'd rather have believed that the remaining years of his life were filled with peace, joy and happiness.  Instead, the outside situation was very different, but it was back to square one for him in many respects.  My heart just entirely went out to him.  He was such a wonderful, but ultimately such a fragile man.

Life is Short

Life really is short.  At 42, I'm well aware of how rapidly it speeds up.  A couple of months ago, my best friend from school, Nicholas, dropped dead in his Mum's house.  It seems like yesterday we were inter-railing around Europe together aged 18.

We all have problems and worries.  I often walk past an old churchyard and see dates like 1772-1845 on them.  I imagine all the worries that the person had: how huge and real their personal fights, dramas and problems were to them... and how that is all now gone and forgotten.  No one is around to remember any of the details.

How big is my problem, looked at from here?

I don't want my short life to be filled with worries.  I want the peace, joy and happiness that I wish Klemperer had had.  Of course I still have my concerns and problems, just as everyone does, but I try consciously to put them in perspective.  A few tricks I do are:

• imagine you're on a spaceship and look down on little Peter and his problems.  How do they look in the great scheme of things, with what's going on in the world? 
• sort out what is real and what is being constructed around it in my head.  What has actually happened, and what am I making it mean, adding in drama and making it worse?
• accept that life is part choice, and a lot of chance. When you realise you can't control many things you are released from something very fundamental
• realise that your can't control much of the shit that goes on in life, but you can often control your reaction to it.
• count your blessings.  I try to do this every night to put things in perspective.  I have so many blessings: my health, my wonderful boyfriend, my dog, my work, my Mutti, my friends, my lovely home 
• try to be in the "now".  You might be worried about something that could happen tomorrow, next week or next month - but you will be destroying your enjoyment of now if you constantly think about it. Just consciously try to shut it out and deal with it then.

Of course the above is exactly the same old bollocks you can read in any self-help book.  I guess we know it, but putting it into practice is a different matter.  There's a bit or a lot of Klemperer in us all.  At least however, we can try. 

And I do try, and after years of doing it, I know it's working.  I'm a far happier, less worrying, more "zen" person than I was before I was 30.  I might get caught up in drama (on and off line!) but it dissipates rapidly.  I think that's the key.



The real troubles will blindside you some idle Tuesday

There's one other point that I'm going to steal from the annoying "Wear Sun Screen" song from a few years back.

Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

How true.  Last Monday I was pottering home from work at 4.40pm, all happy, in my 3-week old shiny new car, in a 30 limit.  I'd spent the evening polishing it the day before.  My 11 year old collie Oscar was in the back.  A car appeared from nowhere in front of me.  He was on my side of the road, overtaking a line of traffic on the crest of a hill.  It was on a bend.  I had one second to brake before the airbags went off. 

 

I'm fine, other than painful whiplash, cuts and a sprained wrist.  I was checked out in A&E and am a month's worth of painkillers.  I've been off work all week.  Oscar was also thoroughly checked out and is 100%.  I've had a rough week: nightmares, shakes, crying.  It's my first collision in 24 years of driving in 30 countries.  There were witnesses and the other car was squarely on my side.  The Police have said they will recommend prosecution.  It could've been so much worse, and all those safety features I paid for (but never expected to use) did their job incredibly well protecting me and Oscar. 

But I have been shaken up.  This blog is an attempt I guess, to "get it all out there", to acknowledge the upset and the problem, and to move on.  People have been lovely to me on and offline, and I am well aware that if I were out on a spaceship, looking down on all the problems on Earth, this doesn't even register.  I'm not about to lose my house, my friends and my life to a murderous regime, let's face it.

If you were one of those people who were kind to me, though, this also my thanks to you.  People can make their own lives better or worse, and can make other people's better or worse too.  I've felt a lot of basic human kindness this week and I appreciate and would like to acknowledge it.