Suddenly, at 52, I'm old. How did that happen?

No less an authority than George Clooney once observed that the way ageing works isn’t gradual. Instead, every 10 years, you age 10 years, pretty much overnight and rarely on the decade’s conk. He was referring to the visuals. However, I’ve discovered that this theorem applies no less to mood, vibes, one’s very self. For, a month off 52, it has happened: I am old.

Up to 51 and a half, I had always been young; resplendently immature. A prolonged stay in academia meant I was late to gainful employment, thus impoverished, achieving my first mortgage only at the age of 47. Blissfully single until the age of 43, choosing not to have offspring, editors would inform me that – regardless of my actual age – I “read young”. To this day, I remain offended when people compliment me by saying that I “look 40”. Surely, they mean 32? I don’t drink, I live for avocado on toast, I am woker than thou, open about mental health, have always resisted gender stereotypes. I don’t worry about the much-touted “vibe shift” – I am the vibe shift.

And, yet, a recent radio appearance forced me into the realisation that a Rubicon has been crossed, age now officially upon me. The subject was office romances. Innocuous enough, you might have thought, but, no. I wheeled out my line: “Two out of five of us confess to having had them – meaning three out of five are lying. A little, light flirtation is essential for sugaring the office pill. After all, why else do we go to work?”“To work!” spluttered one of the twentysomething presenters, horrified at the very thought of regarding one’s colleagues in such a light. “Come on,” I wheedled, “what about you two? Any chemistry? Coffee together after the show?” Answer came there not. I explained that I was talking about a consensual mutual frisson, not some #MeToo situation, to no avail. “What about when the relationship’s over?” cried the male host. “What then?” “Well, you behave like the adults you are,” I answered. But it was too late: I was bundled off air before the entire network got cancelled.

“I didn’t mean to sound like a pervert,” I mumbled to the producer. “Oh, you didn’t, just a sex-positive gen X,” she breezed. And there it was: ancient, decrepit, a one-way ticket to codgerdom. “You psycho,” confirmed a 23-year-old pal. “Only maniacs don’t meet virtually.” I recalled having written one of the first pieces about internet dating back in the early noughties, and how no one would confess to having done it so consuming was the shame. “Man,” said my friend, “the olden days were weird.” The same 23-year-old identifies as pansexual, which makes me feel awed yet tired, and also vaguely as if fauns might be involved. At the same time, such is the rise of ethical non-monogamy (ENM) among the nipperish that it has led to a trebling of British sales of the 1997 manual, The Ethical Slut. Now in its third edition, this tome boasts steers such as: “If you recognise someone in the supermarket that you fondled at the orgy the night before, smile, nod and move on.”

My reservations about polyamory are in no way moralistic. Given that familiarity breeds contempt, adding a rep company of A.N. Others strikes me as not only practical, but rather lovely. Meanwhile, my partner’s refusal to contemplate anything passing for a date night is such that – when I got home at 5.45pm last weekend – he had already had his bath and was in his jim-jams. No, my issue is one of bandwidth, and my absence thereof. All that name-remembering and interest-feigning sounds exhausting. Besides, I no longer expect anyone – let alone a whole host of people – to find me in the least attractive. I was asked whether I objected to having a young, male masseur the other day. “Not at all,” I assured him. “I’m probably the same age as your mother.” “No,” he replied, “my mother is 43.”

I also fail to understand Young People fashion, or rather, the way in which they refuse to have any truck with it. Jewellery – one of my great, self-expressive joys – is despised for being, and I quote my pal, a “disgusting status validation, basically adorning your hands with money”. Clothing must be ghastly, worn tat purchased by weight alone – drooping T-shirts, dismal flannel, dodgy dungarees – because everything else is “too Main Character”. Call me a sex-positive gen X, but if you aren’t prepared to play the main character in your own existence, then who the f--- will? I don’t get the allure of youthful heartthrobs, not least Paul Mescal, who looks like every unremarkable youth I was at school with, chain included. I’m anachronistically vegetarian rather than a vegan or a “carni-paleo flesh-eater”. (Both parties view this as being pathetically agnostic, clearly the one designation in modern life in which one is required to pick a team.)

My oldest niece turned 18 this week and is on her third Ethan. The noughties are the retro era of choice, despite my still frequently writing “2007” as the date. Taylor Swift is no longer 19 or 22, but in her 30s. My generation isn’t even the butt of youthful jokes any more, that distinction having gone to millennials with their centre-partings, Harry Potter fetish, and #adulting.

Notwithstanding a lifelong phobia of nostalgia, I find myself thinking about my undergraduate days constantly, and not merely because my friend’s child has started at my former college. Meanwhile, I appear to have reached the age of 28 in terms of dream-processing past trauma. (Which twentysomething love interest to pick, which, which? The answer, of course, being neither.)

My peers have started retiring, even though I regard my life as not having quite started. Everyone’s got cancer, and I’m developing “a knee”. Basically, I’m a peri-menopausal Prufrock. This, then, is youth’s last-chance saloon. My final moment to adapt, evolve, create radical change: get fit, have an affair, or, at least, learn to make reels. Or maybe it’s time to give up and focus on turning my nephews and nieces into nepo babies?

Sophia Money-Coutts is away

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