There’s a point on the AP-2 motorway in eastern Spain, somewhere between Zaragoza and Barcelona, where you cross the Greenwich meridian line. I’ve driven over it a handful of times and it always catches me by surprise. I guess it’s just not where you expect it to be - the curvature of the earth somehow warps your perception of space and distance in strange ways. A sign unceremoniously announces the imaginary line 500 meters before you cross it and then you drive under a nondescript concrete arc, say “ooh, I didn’t realise that was there” and then get on with your journey and forget about it.
Middle age, as I’m starting to realise, is a bit like that, or maybe like the non-borders between European countries: you’re aware they’re there but are surprised when you pass them, like you could get to your destination without going through them. You say things like “ooh, we’re going into Luxembourg” or “shit, I’m 45, better buy a motorbike/motorhome/motor-something”.
In my case it was a small caravan, a teardrop camper. Not technically motorised, but close enough. For context, I spend, and really have always spent, most of my time indoors. Over the last few years that has started to change though - as I get older, I crave nature and the outdoors more and more. I have no idea why this might be. Perhaps the passage of life highlights how much time we waste. When you start to see a resource as scarce and running out, you inevitably start to value it properly and I definitely regret having spent so much of my limited time on this earth hunched over a keyboard. I think I feel the need to remedy that. So now I’m sitting here in the great outdoors, surrounded by a serene mountain landscape, coffee in a tin mug, fingers frozen, hunched over a laptop writing this. I’ll leave you to judge how successful I’ve been in this endeavour.
Back to the camper. The idea was simple: we have two dogs so finding hotels is a chore. We’re also vegetarian, bordering on vegan, so eating out is mostly a waste of time and money. To be able to get out and explore we needed a bed and a kitchen, which is exactly what you get with a teardrop, so we took the plunge and got one and now we’re ‘practicing’ for a month-long expedition to the highlands by coming up to the mountains around Madrid and seeing if we can emulate bush-influencers on Youtube by rigging up a rain shelter with a tarp and two poles. We can’t. Turns out I’m more ‘typist’ than ‘survivalist’.
But the thing that’s really caught me off guard since we started taking these mini-trips not too long ago is this overwhelmingly nostalgic feeling I get from the campsites, and it makes me feel, well, decidedly middle aged. It’s to be expected I guess, I mean I suppose I am middle-aged now, but the feeling has been strong and persistent enough for me to want to write something about it.
When you are young, you experience family holidays as a kid. You enjoy yourself, do what kids do, and don’t give a second thought to the adults around you. They are just there. Boring. Asleep a lot of the time. But of course, they are also enjoying their holiday - perhaps enjoying a well-needed rest, nature, family time. As a kid, you don’t care about that. In my own middle age I still have a clear memory of what that felt like. In fact, I think ‘being in the middle’ provides a unique perspective in that you are young enough to remember what it felt like to be young, perhaps even vividly, old enough to be ‘not young’, but not old enough to be, well, old. It’s a beige age. Being at a campsite, for me, really triggers this feeling of ‘being on the other side’ of the kid/adult divide. Fading, middle-aged memories of youth blend into the present where I’m now very much playing the role of adult - the other side of the coin. Strangely, I sometimes wish I could go back and make my younger self aware of this feeling. When I see the kids running around the campsite, I wonder if they realise that their parents once experienced such a time and place as they currently are, or that one day they will probably be on the other side of this generational bridge. Of course they don’t, and that’s how it should be. Only adults have the ‘pleasure’ of contemplating this stuff - and it turns out that much to my surprise, some don’t.
Over last night’s dinner, served on plastic kids plates from IKEA (one of many Youtube fuelled, ill-advised camping purchases; you can’t get the grease off them no matter how hard you scrub), I tried to explain these feelings to Jess. As I talked, she screwed her face up in a gesture of complete non-empathy (which I’m intimately familiar with by now) and I immediately realised that she shared precisely none of these sentiments. At first we figured it was because of experiential differences growing up. We were raised in different countries and different settings, me in urban London and her in rural northern Spain. She never went on family holidays, so of course couldn’t vibe with what I was saying. But after a bit more discussion we realised that this actually ran much, much deeper. She, in fact, has no real internal conceptualisation of a ‘life timeline’ nor does she ever think about or obsess about getting old. I was dumbfounded, I thought this was a universal element of the human condition. When John Meyer sings “Stop this Train / I want to get off and go home again / I can’t stand the speed it’s moving in” and “I’ll play the numbers game to say my life has just begun”, that resonates so deeply with me it always almost chokes me up when I hear it. “You never do the maths?” I asked her. “Nope”, she said, genuinely not knowing what the hell I was talking about.
Really? Come on? Who doesn’t do the maths? 45 times 2, that’s 90. I could live to 90. Great, so I’m not ‘quite’ middle aged. How long have I been saying that to myself? What kind of maths will I apply after my 45th birthday? Not sure my basic multiplication and division will suffice. Might have to get into nonlinear algebra.
Why though? Why doesn’t she think about age in the same terms as I do? Our theory is that the socio-cultural treatment of age was so different for her growing up than it was for me that we’ve developed a different relationship to it altogether. In her rural, agricultural village, everyone did, and basically still does, everything together, a single cohesive social unit, irrespective of age. Social groups can range from 25 to 65. Her school consisted of one classroom with all the kids together, from 5 years old to 12 years old. Age was fluid, meaningless, analogue. Back in urban London, age was discrete, digital. If you were 12, you were literally separated from the 13 year old kids by a wire fence. Age was everything. Your entire social group consisted of kids your exact age, plus or minus a few months. I read books, played games and watched movies, all demarcated with a neat circle indicating that it was for my age. Jess just rode her bike around the village with all the other kids.
Could this be the root cause of her ageless existence? I’m not sure, but here’s what I do know. The concepts of ‘midlife’ and ‘middle-age’ are akin to those geographic non-borders we drive through on our way from Spain to Portugal, or France to Germany. There but not really there. We’d probably be best served by forgetting about them altogether but we can’t: the crumbling toll booths and abandoned customs posts are permanent physical reminders.
Moreover, just as the contemplation of the Greenwich meridian line as it bisects the earth warps our perspective of space, so contemplation of age milestones warps our perspective of the passing of time. You can try, like I do, to divide your life into neat lines of latitude and longitude, but life, like the earth, is not flat. It’s not really curved either. It’s some other shape that I don’t have the maths (yet) to describe. The meridians are there, but obscured by the rolling hills, rivers and mountains like the ones that surround me on every side while I’m writing this. You never really know whether you’re in Switzerland or Austria, whether you’re GMT +1 or -1, or young, old, or even, as I may or may not be, beige age.