‘Ring out the old, ring in the new…’ This was the year I discovered that one of my ancestors had been a housemaid deflowered, impregnated and turfed out on to the street by her self-evidently villainous employer – but also that another had been land agent to Lord Tennyson. The perfect incentive for me, then, this festive season, to curl up with ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ The poem’s tone of plangent melancholy, its regret that the years must slip by, will be more than usually in tune with my mood: for in 2025, a mere five days after new year, I shall be marking my 57th birthday. There is, as Tennyson well knew, a kind of pleasure in being lugubrious. The older I get, the more I am looking to embrace it.
I do not intend, however, merely to surrender to my consciousness of ageing. I am, I like to think, a fighter, not a quitter. Last winter, I was stalked in my dreams by a recurring nightmare. Again and again, I would imagine myself on a cricket pitch, running up to bowl. In one dream I would be trapped in sinking sand; in another, holding a shuttlecock or a powderpuff; in another, rather than hitting the stumps with the ball, I would knock out the square-leg umpire. Clearly, then, my subconscious was telling me to go to a gym: something I had never done, nor ever imagined that I would do. The dreams, however, would not be denied. I duly steeled myself; ventured into what seemed a kind of torture chamber, full of glinting machines, glistening muscles and cheery, terrifying slogans – and prepared to be humiliated.
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