I turned 50 on Saturday. Actually, for what it's worth and insofar as it is possible to be precise about events so distant in history, I turned 50 pretty much as I was writing this. I don't feel any different, but that doesn't fool me, writes John Waters.
We live in a culture in which such things are not easily elided. There are, I understand, places where people never quite know what age they are, but this is not one of them. In our societies, age, after sex and colour, is perhaps the most fundamental element of human identity.
Each of us, consciously or not, factors in as part of his apprehension of his fellows an instantaneous computation of chronological age. And yet each of us also, within him- or herself, does constant battle with his own indicator. We lie about it to the world and fudge it to ourselves. We compare and contrast all the time.
Shortly after I came to Dublin, roughly 20 years ago, I became aware of the 50th birthday celebrations of the legendary Hand twins, Mick and Jim, and I well remember my overwhelming feelings of sympathy for them. I saw a photograph of them cutting their birthday cake and wondered what they had to grin about.
I looked at the photo again recently and thought how well they looked in their new suits, with all their hair, seeming in the prime of their lives. They are both dead now for what seems a long time.
Now, here too am I. A friend (50 too) said to me the other day: "Fifty is the new 30", and up to a point she's probably right. But the point is that the only ones who won't swallow this are those who most desperately want to.
The obsession with youth in the present era in the West may be the most intense the world has ever seen. At its heart is a fear of death, itself a symptom of loss of faith.
Because our generations have no true belief in a Hereafter, all our hopes hinge on the realisation of our appetites in the only existence we know about.
The idea that our lives might pass and leave us still full of longing is one that terrifies us to where our very souls used to be.
Our societies tell us that our chances of happiness depend on the number we carry around in our heads, just behind our faces, keeping us ever more awake as fear of the ultimate sleep encroaches.
All the time we seek an unattainable perfection, waiting to freeze-frame ourselves in that optimal moment when we think we have it.
In the next couple of decades, Ireland will move from having a predominantly youthful population to a predominantly middle-aged and elderly population. There should be some comfort in togetherness, but there is only the loneliness born of mutual terror communicated mainly in the avoidance of the subject.
People, generally, are living longer than ever, but grow exponentially miserable about being older. We don't know whether our best chance of satisfaction resides in going on working or spending the maturity of our lives in yellow golfing sweaters.
The British government warns that the ageing demographic may yet require retired people to be recalled to the workplace, even as the leader of the Conservative Party resigns because he is too old at 62.
Meanwhile, the Artist Formerly Known As Joseph Ratzinger accepts the Papacy, one of the most responsible and gruelling jobs in the world at nearly a decade older than Michael Howard can expect to be on completion of a term as British PM.
Faith works.
Age is one of the great tyrannies of our time, not because of its ineluctable attrition as our absolute inability to accept this. Our obsession with ageing causes us to miss youth, including relative youth.
Although half the pages of any newspaper tell us we're counting from the wrong end, our fear of growing old prevents us from realising that we're as young as we're ever going to be, and acting on the implications.
When I was young(er), people seemed to go through the stages of life with something approaching acceptance, relating to rather than competing with each other, seeking balance between youth and experience and seeming to be more connected to some constant essence of themselves than to the meaning of the numbers on their foreheads.
But back then, too, youth was to be seen and not heard, and now it seems the same injunction awaits me in maturity. The ultimate irony of all this is that the generations now about to unleash that senior explosion are those that, in the second half of the last century, worked so hard to undermine the authority and alleged privilege of age.
For the Botox-treadmill-Viagra generations, youth was all. We imagined we would be young forever, blind to the certainty that by indulging our prejudiced view of age and ageing, we were thickening a fog of prejudice that now lies waiting for us. The flower children have stigmatised their finally grown-up selves.