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into bitter focus. The young ones are even more idiotic because they don’t appreciate how short-lived their youth will be, dammit – while the old ones are now a horrifying vision of a steadily approaching future. I’m not talking about OAPs, incidentally, but people just a few years older than I am now. To my eyes, they’re walking victims of the Great Inescapable Time Disaster.
    On a rational level, I know there’s nothing wrong with ageing. If anything, it should be taken as a sign of continued success. Congratulations! You haven’t dropped dead yet. But that doesn’t stop me seeing each individual grey hair as a tiny shoot of failure. Like millions of us, I’ve been indoctrinated into believing the ageing process somehow reeks of indignity. I’ve been conditioned to view everything from the POV of a conceited twenty-something . My brain’s lodged near the bottom of the ladder while my body clambers creakingly towards the top. Look at those silver flecks; that foul, rotting carcass: you stink of shame, you disgusting loser.
    When you’re young, anyone a decade older or more can seem like a gauche joke, tragically unaware of their own crashing irrelevance. They’re either hopelessly out-of-touch (LOL! He’s never heard of Lady Gaga!), embarrassingly immature (Ugh! He listens to Lady Gaga!) or hovering awkwardly in-between (Pff! He uses Lady Gaga as a catch-all reference for youth!). At the same time, you somehow believe that when – if – you ever grow to be so impossibly ancient yourself, you’ll be wiser and less embarrassing. How could you not be? These people are just pathetic.
    The good news is that when you get there, you
are
wiser – albeit only slightly. Chances are you’re still flailing around, just as clueless about What Happens Next. Slightly more terrified at what the world might have in store, but slightly more confident in your ability to pilot a way through.
    And the only real wisdom you’ve gained is a fresh understanding of just how ignorant and arrogant you were in the past: a realisation that the joke was ultimately on you. Pointing and laughing at your own destiny is futile. The harder you sneer at the old, the more uncomfortable you feel when you age.
    And unless you die, you will age. Age and age and age, to a previously unimaginable degree, to the farthest reaches of ‘age space’ and beyond. To the point where, one day, the Shadow Chancellor is younger than you. At which point you experience a subtle, cathartic little death – and thus liberated, finally start to grow up and get on with it.

Pure blockheaded spite
16/10/2009
     
    The funeral of Stephen Gately has not yet taken place. The man hasn’t been buried yet. Nevertheless, Jan Moir of the
Daily Mail
has already managed to dance on his grave. For money.
    It has been twenty minutes since I’ve read her now-notorious column, and I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of itshateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.
    On the
Mail
website, it was headlined: ‘Why there was nothing “natural” about Stephen Gately’s death’. Since the official postmortem clearly ascribed the singer’s death to natural causes, that headline contains a fairly bold claim.
    Still, who am I to judge? I’m no expert when it comes to interpreting autopsy findings, unlike Moir. Presumably she’s a leading expert in forensic science, paid huge sums of money to fly around the world lecturing coroners on her latest findings. Or maybe she just wants to gay-bash a dead man? Tragically, the only way to find out is to read the rest of her article.
    She begins by jabbering a bit about untimely celebrity deaths, especially those whose lives are ‘shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private