The passing of Time
You might regard this as hypocritical or contradictory, but as someone who claims he lacks personal vanity, as I get older I find that my willingness to attend reunions – be they of school old boys, former work colleagues, or the usual round of funerals, wakes and thanksgiving services – exponentially decreases.
It’s all to do with not wishing to be reminded of the effects of passing time if I can avoid it. I’d still maintain under torture on the rack that this has nothing to do with dismay at the image that confronts me every morning in the shaving mirror (though arguably that’s because I don’t necessarily shave every morning any more if I don’t have to), it’s just that – to an extent – part of kidding myself that I’m still young and dynamic is the hope, often in vain, that my peers of a similar vintage will look fit and healthy, albeit inevitably perhaps admittedly in most cases slightly more ‘prosperous’ than they did in our collective heyday.
As I type I’ve got the vague impression that I’ve blogged about this before, in which case I apologise, but decades ago – twenty years afterwards – I organised a reunion dinner for my highly-successful old school rugger 1st XV. Inevitably, the combination of playing sport together and having an exceptional season had forged a bond of camaraderie which the team had carried with it ever since and, as we relived the past and ‘caught up’, it made for an alcoholic, amusing and very rewarding evening.
Thinking about the event afterwards, however, two points came zinging home to me.
The first was – as you might expect of a group of thirty-seven or thirty-eight year olds – via a mix of our hereditary genes and hard-living (or not), most of us had grown fatter, greyer or balder … even a mix of two of the above, if not all three.
This was initially slightly disconcerting, especially when one had not seen a particular individual for ten, fifteen or in some cases the full twenty years since we had been at school together, simply because (inevitably) in advance one’s image of them had been a ‘snapshot’ of how they were at the age of eighteen.
In addition, as happens in life, there were as many stages of ‘maturity’ on display as there were people. With the caveat that of course I am commenting from the perception of someone who has not changed one jot since I was sixteen, some at 37 or 38 had ‘morphed’ into people who now looked as though they had been middle-aged all their lives. In contrast, others looked alarmingly youthful, as if they were barely three or four seasons beyond the day they last took to the field in a game of schoolboy rugby.
The second aspect that struck me was a short exchange that took place at the pub dining table after the plates had been cleared and the port and liqueurs were doing the rounds.
It so happened that only two of our XV had not responded to the reunion invitation, both of them having been reported to have died [ironically one of these who we toasted as ‘absent friends’ that night, news of his death from the school bursar having proved to be a ‘slight exaggeration’ as Mark Twain would have said, turned up at our next – and last – reunion of the same group twelve months later!].
By chance as ties were loosened and a group chat commenced, the subject of conversation came around to one of our number not present, a popular character who had died in a jeep motor accident in Zimbabwe whilst on safari just five years after our ‘famous’ school 1st XV season.
A few stories, memories and anecdotes in, one chap suddenly said “Of course, in one way, Kev is the luckiest of all of us – he’ll only ever be twenty-three”. On the face of it this was a self-evident and obvious statement, of course, but (as I reflected a few days later), also a profound one.
It’s that element I wished to mention today.
This week we’ve had the shock news of the deaths of Debbie Reynolds and her daughter Carrie Fisher on successive days. Like most people, I’ve been aware of them both for decades in a general (‘celebrity’) sense, but without having followed their careers with any great sense of interest. Debbie was best known by me as the young girl star in the iconic Singing In The Rain movie with Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor et al., but in later years had matured into a stereotypical ‘little old granny’ figure with a somewhat bloated (or cosmetically altered) visage.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the Star Wars catalogue (I only ever think I saw the first movie of all) but what I could remember of Carrie Fisher was her as Princess Leia and – as I’m now reminded, though I don’t remember it – a scene or scenes in which she wore a famous gold-metal bikini. More latterly she seemed to make her living by blabbing on chat-shows and in books about her life as a Hollywood celebrity, an alcoholic and having bedded her fellow co-star Harrison Ford.
Be that as it may, both ‘Fisher’ ladies had become, before their deaths, just averagely-well-preserved versions of their former selves. I felt a degree of sadness at their passing, but far greater amount of regret (for them as much for me) that they did not eternally look as they had done in their respective heydays.
Funnily enough, I was ruminating on this theme yesterday as – having decided to drive down to Richmond-upon-Thames for the afternoon – I decided to walk along the river from the town towards Petersham.
[I even found the time and somehow the technical knowledge to take a snap or two of my expedition on my smartphone which (to my surprise) actually came out reasonably well – I have therefore added them to this article by way of illustration].
I’m not really one who habitually walks for pleasure, or indeed personal physical improvement, but with the weather conditions sharply cold attended by bright sunshine and barely a cloud in the sky, it seemed like a good way to spend an hour or two especially after the feasting excesses of the Christmas period.
Plainly I was not alone in this respect. Going in one direction or the other, there were hundreds of people out of all ages, genders and sexual orientation – some walking baby buggies, others walking dogs, or riding bicycles, or jogging, or sitting on benches, or sitting outside riverside cafes sipping tea and eating buns – presumably all of us ‘taking the air’ in the cause of an anticipation of later feeling better for having had the exercise.
Given the cold, I was suitably wrapped up in a heavy sweater and anorak and sought to ‘stride out’ somewhat, partly to ensure that my new Garmin fitness wristband would log a healthy amount of steps towards my daily target total.
For another thing, I don’t like dawdling or ambling along because it smacks of existing rather than doing.
Slightly in defiance of my own expectations I thoroughly enjoyed my outing. Richmond has its scenic attractions – there are landmarks around such as the Petersham Hotel and The Star and Garter building (now turned into flats costing several millions of pounds each) on the top of Richmond Hill – and plenty happening on the river.
Several separate herds of canoes went back and forth on its surface between Richmond and Twickenham, there were hundreds of house boats (in varying states between rotting, sunken and spectacularly impressive and/or brand new) along the banks on the Twickenham side and there was a cornucopia of every type and generation of human being imaginable (and then some) to occupy and fascinate the passing observer.
One incident that contained an echo of my opening passage to this piece occurred only about twenty minutes into my afternoon’s perambulation.
These days even I can admit openly that I am a few years past my prime – for starters I’ve put on roughly a stone per decade and gone both bald and white-haired. But as I walked past the Argentinian riverside steak-house restaurant my acute powers of observation remained undimmed.
Coming towards me – equally anonymously it seemed – were the unmistakable figures of Rupert Murdoch and his new wife Jerry Hall, clearly out for a post-lunch stroll like the rest of us.
For a moment Jerry and I looked at each other. Lingeringly. I could tell she recognised something about me, probably the area around my eyes and the inner charisma that yonks ago used to stop ladies in their tracks whenever I walked into a room. Her brain was working overtime. She was scouring her memory: who was this devastatingly attractive man she had once known so well from a distance via the pages of Jackie magazine or similar publications?
The moment passed. A fleeting brush between two individuals who had once dominated the planet and the gossip columns. Neither of us looked back – well, she didn’t.
And there, in a microcosm, was a chance meeting gone. When I had returned home to my cup of tea, a toasted scone and the last two mince pies in the box, I spent a little time reflecting upon the vagaries of life and hoping that Jerry would never quite manage to work out who I was, so that her memories of the dashing blade she used to admire from afar some thirty or forty years ago remained intact.
