Dear LPG,

I am just about to have a milestone birthday and my children are planning a surprise party which I am pretending I don’t know about, but that very fact has stopped me in my tracks a bit and got me thinking back.

There is something daunting about getting older.  I have heard so many people say that as I have grown up and it seems that the milestones, the birthdays that take you to the ages that end with ‘0s’ or ‘5s’ are the ones that cause real concern.

I remember wanting to be 20 when I was a young teenager because I thought that that would be the best year of anyone’s life.  All the celebrities and pop stars looked that sort of age, well they did to me and a lot of them still do. 

I am sure that I am not the only person to have thought it was all over when they got to the big 30 either.  I suspect that some of us may have been at the beginning of, or at the seven-year itch stage of, a marriage by then with work and children taking up all our waking moments.  I remember thinking about what was going on briefly but being too busy to do much more than keep my mind on the immediate problems in my life to really step back and look at where I was then.  The sad thing is that, when I look back at pictures of myself at that age, I was as good-looking as I was ever going to get and I never even had time to appreciate that fact.

We, who are now younger pensioners, got to the age of 40 within the ten years either side of the beginning of this century.  At that time every decade of life was supposed to have got ten years younger and ’40 became the new 30’, so I let that one slide.

Then the reality of becoming a 50-year-old kicks in.  This is the decade of life when you get some of your time back.  Work is still taking up most of it, but at least the kids become more independent.  By then we have got used to all those things that caused us to worry about them.  The boyfriends and girlfriends we did not really approve of and the worry of sleepless nights when they stay out too late.  In fact, the only real worry left occurs when it comes down to how much money they need to “borrow” permanently when they get to that age.

Before we know it, we get to 55 which is the time when we are busy having had enough of the life race we are running and find ourselves looking forward to retirement and getting off the treadmill that we have battled with for so long.  The work is still there but the prospect of retirement and all the plans we have for it come into play.

And finally 60 (or 65 for the men), which is the time to finally breathe out and appreciate the world around us again.  But isn’t it funny how, so often, all the plans for slowing down get lost and we find ourselves as busy as we ever were. 

Then comes 70 when all the other things we do get complicated with hospital appointments and more visits to the doctors.

Although where the ‘0s’ and ‘5s’ punctuate life for our children will be different now that the government have thrown in the projected number 67, I have no doubt that the numbers will be changed a little, but I wonder if the generations to come will continue to get to 70 being able to tell a story which reflects the same general theme as mine with a few numerical variations?

NW, Lee