SOME intimations of mortality are specific.
For one thing, you have to be of a particular age to notice the ticking of the clock just because a Monkee has passed away. That's before you begin to argue with yourself – another infallible sign – by insisting that surely poor Davy Jones was older than 66 when the heart attack took him.
You were at primary school when he was first a tiny star. He was a nostalgia act, for pity's sake, for most of his career. His face and name were part of whatever it was that happened in the 1960s. His death can't have even a passing relevance to you, can it? Then the mental dialogue concludes with three words: don't be stupid.
Suddenly, the signs are everywhere. One is on the front page of your newspaper. On Thursday, The Herald put an ache in my day by reporting that "Ageing Scotland faces population time bomb". The number of pensioners will rise by a half a million in 20 years, said our sister paper's story. Within 23 years, the percentage of Scots of pensionable age will increase, according to the National Records of Scotland office, from 16% to 23%. The only thing the report forgot to add was a warning: this means you.
As it happens, I had worked that out for myself. I don't mean I had suddenly grasped what's implied by an accumulation of birthdays. It was more of a slow realisation. Very soon now, the category defined as "older people" – once known as the old – will be occupied by my generation, and there will be more of us within that group than the species has yet seen. Age will cease to be abstract, and we will become commonplace.
My first reaction to the news story was also – so they tell me – age-specific. I grew grumpy and a little pensive. Where grumpiness is concerned I had a head start; legend says I was born that way. As to pensive, I leave that to others to judge. But is this the first effect of creating a society dominated by "pensioners"? Will this dramatic shift in the Western world's age profile simply create an incessant background grump? If not, I shall probably complain.
I could say there has always been a lot of stuff I count as rubbish. I could also admit that the quantity doesn't appear to be declining. Amid the dross are those endless TV programmes devoted to grumpy old men. But facts are facts. I don't "keep up" any more. I don't go to the pictures, couldn't talk for 30 seconds about new albums, merely complain – grumpily – about the amount I pay for the television I can't stand to watch, and lack the patience to wonder who the new novelists happen to be.
Books are interesting in that regard. There comes a moment when you realise that you will never finish the list. Time is making itself scarce. You have to decide: finally take a crack at all those ponderous Henry James things for which once there was always a better alternative, or bother with the Booker winner? Work your way through whatever your canon happens to be, or go on pretending that tomorrow never comes?
The attitude is connected, oddly enough, with a talent for grumpiness. If you have a finite amount of time, why waste it on rubbish? There is never a shortage. There is, though, that chilling moment when you realise that if you don't get around to the last Flaubert it might – and the thought still seems strange – never happen. Yet why is this any different from those distressing people obsessed with all the things they must do before they are 60, 70, or beyond caring?
That last condition, I note, is becoming habitual. There is a difference between the things that annoy me and the things, growing in number by the year, about which I no longer care. Youth's passions are going, replaced by a simple response to most of the controversies of the day: it doesn't matter.
To take a random example, I will only ever again care about who leads the Labour Party if someone can prove that the fact will have consequences a decade down the line.
History interests me more and more. The most interesting part of it is that, suddenly, a large part of my life – the bit that happened when I was busy making other plans – has become historical.
I resist these tendencies. I don't rage against the dying of the light, not unless the bulb has gone in the bathroom again, but I resent being typecast. An example: I've worn jeans all my life. I've been wearing jeans since the first Levis were being shrunk to fit in Scottish council house baths. I resent some juvenile telling me that denim looks inapt, shall we say, on a middle-aged man. But then I see Jeremy Clarkson on TV and think: fair point.
A tendency towards conservatism in an ageing population seems, on the face it, inevitable. As I sometimes mutter, my elders in the so-called counter-culture wound up voting for Reagan and Thatcher: very mature. A Scotland dominated by "pensioners" – most of whom will be working until doomsday – isn't likely, you might think, to welcome novelty, innovation, or youth's upheavals. But it might not be quite so simple.
First, another kind of novelty will be evident. When I was a child, octogenarians were rare, and remarked upon. Now there are vigorous old people everywhere.
There is no reason to presume that as a group they will be reactionary rather than radical, nothing to say that when they exercise their political power – and they will – it will not be with a certain impatience. Who'll push them around? David Cameron?
In youth, you are told endlessly that you will "grow out" of this or that, political ideas not least. Had the predictions come to pass, I would now be chairing my local Conservative association. Some of my peers in the media might be on their way to knighthoods – we'll name no names – but I'm still prepared to give a rioter the benefit (and a bit more) of the doubt. Am I alone in that? I doubt it.
This is not, I hope, the grisly pretence of permanent youth. When I observe, say, the Occupy movement, one part of me cheers and thinks: "Stop being so obliging." Another part is muttering: "It'll never work, you know." After a while, the lessons of experience weigh heavier than hope. But perhaps a society dominated by the old will have enough experience not to be taken in when next a mad neo-liberal is peddling shop-worn ideas.
The Herald's story raised some obvious points. An ageing society will have to provide for itself. Care – health, housing, wellbeing generally – will grow more expensive. We will therefore have to confront accepted ideas. One might be the notion of retirement itself. Another might be the belief that medicine must always extend life, no matter what. A third, in consequence, would involve the taboo against assisted dying.
Personally, I just want an end to all the "life begins at" rubbish. Fifty-something is not better than forty-something, and neither is a patch on twenty-something. Ageing doesn't sit well with me. That might be my best bet.
