I recently celebrated another birthday. I say ‘celebrated’, but it was all very subdued thanks to me spending the day in question feeling exhausted, thanks to some noisy neighbours. Not noisy in the sense that they kept me up all night with their loud love-making – that might at least have been entertaining. (To digress slightly, I did once have the misfortune to have next door neighbours who indulged in noisy sex – but they always seemed to be at it during the day, which is bloody disconcerting if you are sitting down for a cup of tea while watching Neighbours on the telly, only to be interrupted by the moanings of your real life neighbours). To cut a long story short, I’ve lately been having increasing problems in actually sleeping at night. Which isn’t necessarily a problem, as these days I can sleep during the day, (although these seriously disrupted sleep patterns bring their own problems). Except that on my birthday, I couldn’t, due to the racket being made by the idiots supposedly renovating a house down the terrace. From well before nine o’clock in the morning, it sounded as if they were throwing stuff into the garden and smashing it up – all as loudly as possible. (I didn’t go out to see what was actually going on as I feared that I’d end up shouting and arguing with the anti-social bastards, which wouldn’t have been good for my blood pressure). This went on all morning, preventing me from catching up with my sleep – I did eventually catch a couple of hours in the afternoon, but I was left feeling completely shattered.

It isn’t as if actually I bother celebrating my birthday as such – I’m too old for that – but it is a day when I’m as idle as possible. Unfortunately, due to the events already described, I was unable even to enjoy my customary celebratory idleness. I was too tired even to settle down to watch a series of low rent exploitation films, (my favourite way of idling away my birthday). Still, despite the advancing years, I still don’t feel particularly aged. Mind you, others seem to think differently: yesterday I had through my letterbox another invitation to sell my house and move to a new, totally anonymous, retirement flat. Worse still, it was accompanied by another piece of junk mail about planning my funeral. For fuck’s sake – I haven’t even started drawing a pension yet! I’ve still got some way to go yet before I qualify as an OAP. (Although I do have a couple of work pensions from previous jobs which will start paying out next year). A couple of weeks ago I had one of those jarring experiences where someone younger seemed to think that I was old and confused and in need of their assistance, (I wasn’t, I was merely trying to shake all of the junk mail out of a copy of The Guardian in Tesco, before I bought it). I refrained from telling them to ‘fuck off you patronising cunt’ and simply stared them out, instead.

I really don’t know where they were coming from – I don’t look particularly old. Sure, my hair is thinned with more grey encroaching these days, but they couldn’t have judged me from that as I was wearing a hat at the time. Unfortunately, though, the young have this idea that anyone more than a couple of years older than them is Methuselah. Teenage girls are the worst – I once overheard one describing me as an ‘old person’ simply because I wasn’t walking as quickly as them. (One thing age does teach one, I’ve found, is to slow down a bit and actually enjoy the world around you). But this sort of casual ageism isn’t confined to just kids. Recently, I have had the task of trying to convince a teaching agency that, no, I really don’t have any photo ID – my passport is long out of date and I still have an old-style driving licence. This isn’t uncommon for people of my age who are used to living in a free country where we don’t constantly have to prove who we are. Yet, they seemed incredulous that anyone could exist without such things, despite my pointing out that photo ID is not mandatory in the UK – we’re not a police state. Yet.

The fact is that we don’t have to prove who we are, not even to the police, who have to accept that you are who you say you are, unless they can prove different. (Yeah, I know that our quasi-fascist government has introduced legislation requiring ID in order to be allowed to vote, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, possibly by using the loophole of applying for a postal vote). They also seemed to expect me to somehow prove my right to work in the UK, despite the fact that they have on file a valid National Insurance number for me and a scan of my birth certificate which confirms that I was born a UK citizen, (hence the NI number being issued to me at age sixteen), which is pretty much all the right I need to work here. Oh, not to forget my entire prior work history that they have on record, most of which was spent working for UK government bodies. Most bizarrely, despite having told them numerous times that since leaving my last job, I’ve been on what is termed a ‘career break’, they want a reference for 2021. Well, bearing in mind that if I haven’t been working, I’ve been, in effect, my own boss, I can only assume that they want me to tell them how fabulous I’ve been in tackling various bits of home renovation and writing about obscure films since 2021. I wouldn’t mind, but they’ve had all of these details for years but are now insisting that I have to re-register. This is all because I merely expressed an interest in maybe doing some part-time supervision work this year. If it is going to be this much trouble, I don’t think that I’ll bother. I really don’t need the money, let alone the grief. I’m sure that there are plenty of other opportunities out there which don’t involve this sort of madness.

Obviously, all of this has left me deeply taumatised to the extent that I’ll have to retreat to the parlour, put on my dressing gown and slippers and settle down with a hot cup of cocoa to watch an episode of Midsomer Murders…

Doc Sleaze