Well, here we are. Sixty-eight. Not one of your grandstanding ages. Not a nice, neat multiple of ten, not a coming-of-age, not an “over-the-hill”—though, let’s be honest, the hill is well and truly behind me now, and I’ve been strolling down the other side for a good while. But sixty-eight, I think, is a respectable sort of age. It’s solid. It’s lived-in. It’s like a comfortable old armchair—the stuffing’s gone a bit, but it still holds together, and when you sit in it, it feels like home.
The thing about birthdays is that people expect you to look back. To tot it all up, weigh your successes against your failures, and see if you come out ahead. And I suppose at sixty-eight, I’m happy to say I do. Just about. There have been some personal lows—times when life gave me a bit of a kicking and didn’t even have the decency to let me get my breath back before the next one came along. But there have also been highs, and I find those tend to linger longer in the memory.
At sixty-eight, there are more photographs on the iPhone—some good, some bad, some where I seem to have taken an accidental close-up of my own ear. There are more mistakes made, of course. But the thing about mistakes is that you collect them like old receipts in your wallet, meaning to go through them one day but never quite getting around to it. And in the end, they don’t matter much. The lessons, though—they do. They stick.
And sixty-eight is not without its amusements. There’s the small satisfaction that next year, I will be sixty-nine, which is a number that always manages to raise an eyebrow if you say it with the right inflection. I think of it as a little birthday gift from mathematics.
Looking back, if you’d asked me twenty, thirty, forty years ago what sixty-eight would look like, I’m not sure I’d have pictured myself here, living on a boat that, like an elderly aunt in a new cardigan, looks its best in the fresh, forgiving light of early spring.”, alongside someone I love, and who—more improbably—seems to love me back. I probably imagined something more sedate. Maybe a neatly clipped lawn. A quiet life. Sensible shoes. Not this particular, peculiar adventure.
And speaking of surprises—three years ago, single at sixty-five, I thought I knew the script. I’d find someone, probably a bit younger, we’d swap pension plans, set up a joint policy on our mobility scooters, and do a package tour of the Faroe Isles. I had it all worked out. But life, as it turns out, had other plans. And instead, I met Brayden.
Brayden, who is kind and loving and understands me better than I know myself. Brayden, who makes me laugh and makes me think and somehow, miraculously, has made me feel truly, utterly loved. And so, at sixty-eight, I find myself in the unusual position of being happy. Really, truly, ridiculously happy. Which is not what I was expecting, but then, the best things in life rarely are.
So, today, I’ll be celebrating with old friends who have stood by me through thick and thin and new friends who, until recently, I didn’t know but who now feel like they’ve always been there. I’ll be surrounded by people who make me smile, who treat me well, and who remind me that, whatever else I may have done, I must have done something right.
So yes, happy birthday to me, from me. And if you fancy raising a glass or indulging in a bit of quiet reflection of your own, then feel free. I’m not keeping this birthday all to myself.
And in the words of Robert Browning, which seem particularly apt today:
Grow old with me, the best is yet to be.
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