What's in an Age?

In a couple of nights we will be celebrating New Year's Eve. It's like the world's birthday. But what’s in an age?

Well, a lot, and most of it bad.

"Happy Birthday Earth" - Earthlings, 01/01/2014, 00:00

As a child a birthday can be a wonderful thing. Each one is a colourful opportunity to celebrate with friends and family. Your life is defined by your age, or, more accurately, your date of birth. It decides what class you enter into at school and what sports teams you play in, and by extension it largely designates your circle of friends and partly your relative position of seniority within that circle. In our younger years, every birthday seems like the beginning of a new era, a fresh beginning. You wake up feeling more respected and more responsible. Personally, I had a period during which I was convinced I woke up physically taller on my birthday. You also get presents and recognition. It’s great.

Then as a teenager, birthdays begin to provide real opportunities. Drinking, driving, working, etc. (and by 'etc.' I mean 'naughty business'). The doors of the world begin to really open up to you. You take the new responsibilities on hungrily until one day, usually sometime around your early twenties, you realise that there are no more opportunities to be opened, no further rights to be bestowed, no more inches to grow. After this point, birthdays take on a new complexion. No longer do they signify freedom, respect, recognition or anything much exciting at all.

This is something I have learnt, to my displeasure. Soon, it will be 2014, the year I turn 24. I am not looking forward to it at all.

Sad birthday man (not me)

Dark and unsettling thoughts are starting to creep into my mind now.

For one, I am beginning to wonder if I have already passed my physical prime. I work now. No longer in university, I realise what that means. I sit down in front of a computer for (at least) 40 hours a week and… work. Why? For… money! I literally work for money! Mostly anyway. I remember being asked by my old music teacher at a parent-teacher meeting (oh god, I remember those – and so do my parents) what I wanted to do when I was older. I just said I didn't want to work in an office. Oh the shame I should feel! Future me was supposed to be so much more interesting and mobile. Instead, here I am, getting fatter by the day while two LED screens continuously assault my retinas. Now I wonder if I will ever be as fit again as I was leaving university, just post the heady days of going to the gym out of boredom and an abundance of free time, with very little of my reserves of self-motivation drained at all. I guess it’s all downhill from here. I am even thinking of taking on a second job. Have to pay for those future medical bills somehow.

Future bills.

B*******

At what age do I start saving for my pension? How in the name of god do I do that living in Slovakia? What do other 23-year-olds do? I'm sure they don't think about this, but that doesn't mean it isn't dumb as hell.

Yep, this is another burden of the birthday – figuring out where we are in life by the relative age, achievements and responsibilities of others. That makes no sense at all, but we all feel it.

The dreaded day comes around. ‘Happy birthday’ you hear from all over, and everyone is delighted. You go out drinking, and who can blame you? With all that I have just mentioned, what else could you do? Especially with everyone seemingly so upbeat about your slow demise into a deeper adulthood. To the bar we go, en masse, to celebrate our fellow as his biological clock ticks further upwards to its eventual nothing. And that's another thing! It’s in our heads somewhere, every birthday from that some point in our twenties – death, I mean. You might call me macabre, but it is there in our subconscious with every tick of the annual clock. It is the defining characteristic of age. Without it, we have no concept of youth, no concept of career, of life's progression, of retirement. The first national age of retirement was set in Germany at the average age of death. That average number gives context to our lives. And so we drink, and yes, we really do celebrate because, though our age and our birthdays are a horrible psychological burden to us all, it is a burden we share together.

Happy New Year everyone (though god knows why we celebrate that).

A Christmas unlike any other - seasons meh

This year has been an odd Christmas.

We didn’t do presents this year in our house. Not to be Scrooges, but we’re a busy lot and none of us are kids any more. Add to this the fact that we have no great love of shopping and often complain about “What Christmas has turned into” etc. and this seems like a logical development. The idea was that we would all meet up as a family over the break and go out for a meal or something – quality time during the time of Quality Street. My mother repeatedly checked with me during the run-up to Christmas that I was OK with the absence of presents this year (I guess her logic was that as the ‘baby’ of the family I had the most to lose present-wise) but, with a bank-balance of minus £496.16, I was quite content to escape from any expectations of generosity. Not that I mentioned this.

Christmas without presents - just candles and cards?

There are many modern clichés about Christmas which I begrudge, and one is that Christmas is ‘for children’. It’s not, which is why we have mulled wine and brussel sprouts. Christmas morning is for children, and religion, but mostly children. And the child in me was a little disappointed on Christmas morning, when it remembered that there would be no brightly-wrapped parcels waiting for it down in the house. I realise that at 21 I should just get over it, but it was like the kidult version of finding out Santa’s not real. With a heart just a little bit heavier than it might have been, I trudged down to the kitchen and opened my expected parcel of underwear with a slightly unexpected set of hair clippers. A necessary present – I think I’m finally an adult. Incidentally, this was the first year I was able to drink wine with my Christmas dinner in front of my parents without feeling somehow guilty. But with no kids around and with most of us a little worn-out or preoccupied (I know I have uni work to do, if only I could remember what it was) this yuletide (what does ‘yuletide’ actually mean?) has been a little subdued – even the football on Boxing Day was balls, excuse the pun.

Another cliché of our modern Christmas is the curse of ‘Xmas’ – the godless consumerist monster Christmas that eats up our children and spits out devious little present-goblins who go foamy-mouthed at every ad-break on the Cartoon Network. This is the Christmas I’ve largely managed to avoid, only really venturing near Belfast city centre to skirt around the shops to the bus station and head home. What this Christmas lacked in magic it has more than made up for in lacking in the stress and annoyance of having to search the shops with a wallet crying out for its next student loan instalment in amongst crowds of ‘shoppers’ – who are spoken of on the evening news as if they were a new breed of man in a sci-fi movie, bent on finding bargains and driving our economy.

Victoria Square Christmas Shopping. It looks like fun, but don't be fooled.

It has been a relief to just chill out this year. I am learning to appreciate the little luxuries. Christmas Eve was spent over at the cousins. A home-cooked meal, mulled wine, mince pie in brandy cream, baked Alaska, a few beers and plenty of craic. After dinner the cousins (exceptionally lethal on the guitar) took over the entertainment, playing mostly 60s and 70s classics, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Nancy Griffith, etc., and a few of their own. It was nice, and it has been nice to hang out at home again for a while, going for walks in the morning then coming back and munching everything in sight. You can practically smell the Milk Tray all over the house. The TV isn’t bad this Christmas either, Monsters v. Aliens, Ratatouille, Saturday Night Fever, The Watchmen – all good escapist stuff. There is something else I have been missing though. This year was also the first year I didn’t attend any Christmas services. I don’t miss being religious, but I miss Christmas mass. It reminded me of when I thought Christmas was something more than a date on the calendar.

Last Christmas was chilled out...

...in that it was friggin freezing.

My dad often laments how Christmas has lost its religious meaning, with an X even replacing ‘Christ’ in the word itself. My mum speaks fondly of how, as a child, whenever I was asked what I would be getting for Christmas in the shops or somewhere my face would light up and I would simply say “A surprise!” On a bus around October-time I heard two boys about 13 years old discussing what they were getting for Christmas. It was October and they already knew! And it was a lot. Too much. I even hear of adults (kidults) in their 20s and 30s telling their siblings what present they want bought for them. At that age you can afford or budget for your own crap, but people can be so obsessed with achieving the maximum from the holiday period that they are destroying the idea of a surprise. To me, that’s a huge leap back.

To cap off an odd holiday, I didn’t go out to the pub on Boxing Night. Normally this is a tradition when at university involving catching up with ‘ones from round home’ and Jagerbombs. I guess I just couldn’t be arsed and I’m well broke (see opening paragraph for bank balance). But it has added to the sense of a festive jigsaw puzzle somehow incomplete. Without religion, without consumerism, and without getting blocked, what is Christmas? Sure, there is still turkey, ham and TV movies, but that could be any Sunday. I suppose from this Christmas I will remember Christmas Eve at the cousins and just spending some time at home, which is something it’s harder to find time for these days. Another Christmas cliché, but one I can abide by – Christmas is for family.

And Milk Tray.

And mulled wine.

But mostly family.