80

I must admit that I greatly admire people that can make it to the age of 80. Though longevity is reportedly in my genes, I often feel more like David Bowie in The Hunger, ageing rapidly within, way beyond my years, a bone/muscle double inheritance featuring waterworks and other issues, cognitive included, where I find myself acceleratedly and ungleefully whitewater- rapiding through to the great Pink Floydian chutes in the sky.

Simultaneously, it does truly feel that in many ways, 80 is the new 60. Biden and Trump are somewhat unbelievably the main contenders for the election next year, even if most people think they are too doddering over the hill to be taken properly seriously ( and both make me shudder ); yet both are still somewhat outrageously (and realistically )vying for the position of Most Powerful Person is the world. But then the Rolling Stones are also releasing a new record, Diana Ross (79) was headlining only recently at Glastonbury, Joan Collins is 90 and still flashing a boob and a sequin-fastenened thigh with younger beau when she gala feels like it ( as is Cher, 77 but unlikely to quit the show just because she is 80: her spirit is indomitable) and hats off to Nancy Pelosi for stalwarting her way through all manner of heinosity; it took some guts. In the artworld, Yoko Ono still rocks it mightily at 90, as does Yayoi Kusama at 94 (I once stared into her eyes at the Mori Tower in Tokyo and knew at that moment – I had naughtily strayed longer than I was supposed to and she had arrived earlier – that the black diamond madness was actually real); David Hockney is still exhibiting new paintings at 86, and I suddenly realized the other day that I have recently been out at the cinema to see films by several octogenarian auteurs I have long admired, including Dario Argento, Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg ( if Crimes Of The Future certainly wasn’t the Canadian creepoid’s best work, it still intrigued); Clint Eastwood – not my political bag but brilliant, film wise still, at 93 (how?!!! ); directors you are understandably not allowed to like ( (Woody Allen, Roman Polanski ) but whose film catalogue you vastly admire nonetheless – 87 and 90 respectively !- premiering films at Cannes ; your favourite directors like David Lynch (77) and Brian De Palma (83) still off in the jungles of Colombia trying out new aesthetics and screenplays and ideas …. … ……all of it just making you feel sometimes guilty, as I often do, for feeling clapped out (and decrepit and pathetic) at 52.

There is so much terrain still to cover.

So many energy reserves left, if you can find the life inspiration and the meaning and you still have the verve (and the nerve) to go there; slaking off the unwanted skeins of ageist received wisdom and keeping – as much as you realistically can – the physical apparatus in check . To just shake it off, like The Incredible Hulk, or the irrepressible Taylor Swift : The parameters and paradigms – in the recent, convulsively transformational decades – now seeming – at some meaningful and deeper level of human consciousness, in much of the world – to have genuinely, rightfully, changed.