Out of Time. Miranda Sawyer

what I did – writing about popular culture, especially music – now that I was twice the age of those I talk to? A music writer. A critic. These jobs are as old-fashioned as being a miner, and as destined for redundancy. That’s a proper hangover.

      Anyway, weren’t clubs partly about fancying people? I seemed to have a shifting sense of who I am. If you’re settled in a relationship, what does that mean? How does middle age affect your idea of love, of sex, of faithfulness? What about money? Not only did I know many people who earned a lot more than me, money, in general, seemed to have changed its meaning.

      And what of the shallower stuff? How I looked. What my body could do, how it worked. My blood still pumped, I still bled. Did my body bleed as it used to?

      Gradually, gradually, in between the bubbling, same-old rigmarole of everyday life, I came up with a plan. I would look back for a short time. (What’s the phrase? ‘Looking back is fine but it’s rude to stare.’) I would look back quickly, just long enough to investigate my prejudices and assumptions about adulthood. I would recall my twenties, check in on my thirties. There would be no beating myself up about wrong decisions, I would merely tell the tale. And then, I would arrive at my forties and I would look at that. At this middle decade, between the old age of youth and the youth of old age.

      I would think about what I looked like. What my body can do. What marriage means, what happens when it changes over time. Work, and how our 90s’ assumptions might affect how we work now. Money. Money, which leads to jealousy. Anger, and patience, how they grow or die.

      How children impact on your life in the everyday. Not the love – the love is assumed, we know the love – but what having children means for those who care for them, the routine of them, the stability. Parents. Family.

      And death, I suppose. Time. The time left.

      If I couldn’t tie these subjects down, catch them, skewer them with a ready pin for labelling and exhibition, then at least I could watch them fly. I could marvel at their existence. I might even see them settle (from the corner of my eye), and then I might glimpse their colours.

       2. Adult-ish

      January is always a bastard. Not only because it’s January, but because it’s my birthday, on the 7th. Exactly one week after New Year’s Eve, two weeks after Christmas Eve, when nobody wants to go out, or drink alcohol, or spend money, or see anyone they know well ever again, other than to tell them precisely what they think of them and their crappy idea of a gift or a joke or a long-term partner. S has used up all his present ideas for me over Christmas. And even if I do celebrate my birthday, the next day when I wake up, guess what? It’s still January.

      But, you know, the kids love a birthday. They love giggling outside our bedroom door and then sneaking up to the bed with all the noiseless subtlety of piglets in mining boots. They love nudging each other – ‘You go, go on, one, two, three’ – before shouting, ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MUM,’ and singing the birthday song and its coda: ‘How old are you now? How old are you now? How old are you NO-OW? How old are you now?’ They know the answer. Those birthday bumps would break your back.

      Downstairs, on the kitchen table, my array of presents is minimalist. A card from my mum. A printout of a photo of the four of us from S, with a promise to ‘buy you something later’. Two packets of Haribo Tangfastics, my favourite sweets, from P, wrapped wonkily in Christmas paper. Not exactly bumper. But you know what? It’s fine.

      I take the kids to school and F tells everyone it’s my birthday, and my age. This is also fine. I’m not going to start lying about it. How old am I no-ow? I am 44. I am 45. Or 46, 47, 48. Not much has changed in the past few years. I am an adult. Whatever that is.

      I watch P as we walk to school. Though I often forget how old I am, and when I remember it pulls me up short, he is of an age when every birthday is vital, when how many years (months, days) you’ve lived add up to power. When two years’ age difference is a chasm, an insurmountable status gap. Another small boy, a head taller than my son, just another kid to me, is as thrillingly attractive and powerful to P as a pop star. He keeps trying to play football with the older boys. He trots faster to catch up with them. I can see them tolerating his breathless jokes, bearing his presence, but only just.

      P’s birthday parties involve football, usually; sometimes the cinema or Laser Quest. What did I do when I was his age? How about older? 15? I can remember my 17th birthday (in a Scout hall) and my 21st party (above a pub) and my 30th, and my 40th, just a few years ago. My 40th birthday party was very like my 30th. The main difference was that when a stranger offered me ecstasy, I didn’t take it.

      I don’t want a party like that now. I’m not sure why. Some time over the past few years I lost the desire to be the centre of attention and the stamina required for all the organizational palaver. I wouldn’t mind a party in the summer, maybe, with champagne cocktails and up-and-at-’em music, around a heated open-air swimming pool. A barbecue. Nicely dressed young people topping up drinks. In Los Angeles.

      But in January, in London, in an expensive, cramped, roped-off area of a pub that you have to vacate at 11 p.m. or share with whichever punters decide to wander in? No, thanks. Maybe I’ll think differently when I’m 49 and a half.

      Our idea of adulthood is formed by our youth. Adults were a puzzle to me when I was young. I looked at them and thought: How did they ever get married? Who could love these enormous, slow-moving creatures, with their pitted skin and springy hair? Their trousers hung loose over their flattened behinds. Their chipped, crumby teeth were like the last biscuits in the tin. When they were close, unpleasant smells leaked from hidden places. They talked a lot, in booming voices, about nothing important. They sat down. Then they stayed sitting down.

      (‘Come on, Mum!’ says F, in frustration. ‘Stop talking! Let’s PLAY!’)

      Not all adults were the same. I settled on my dad’s lap and put my hands on the outside of his hands. I tried to force them together, to make him clap. He’d resist, hold steady, until suddenly, he relaxed, and let my pushing win. Blapp! His big hands, cupped, made the most impressive noise I’d ever heard. A gunshot, a crack that split the air, indoors or out. I used to try to copy him. But the Dad Power Clap cannot be made by the young. Only dads, with their dad hands, can create such thunder.

      I liked my dad’s smell. He smelt of nothing much, Swarfega sometimes, toast sometimes, talc. He didn’t wear aftershave. My mum didn’t wear perfume. She had a bottle of Chanel No 5, which I played with, but the liquid was orange, the scent was off. Sometimes, she smoked in the car on the way from work and her clothes smelt, not like fire, but chemical, metallic. She hid her cigarettes from us in her handbag. ‘Death sticks’, some people called them. I took them one by one, from the golden box, examined them, slit them open to scrutinize the curling tobacco slivers. Death looked a lot like wood shavings.

      She stood in front of me and my brother and said, ‘Look, my thighs join all the way up, too.’ This was to my brother. He was weird about his legs, because mine were a different shape, and he was younger and wanted to be like me. I knew it didn’t matter – who cared what your legs looked like? It was whether you could run fast that was important – but it was another reason to lord over him. I liked to emphasize our differences, though we were very similar. Our bodies were small and strong. We hung them upside-down from anything.

      My mum wore no make-up. Her cosmetics bag contained one brown mascara, old and dried up, one lipstick and some shiny blue eye shadow. She rarely used any of them. Not when she went to work, as a secondary-school teacher, not when she saw friends. Only on special birthdays, when we went out to a restaurant to sit quietly and worry over cutlery selection. She wore trousers, no heels. In heels, she towered over my dad.

      Neither of my parents put much effort into their appearance – odd, when we lived in a suburb that judged you by what you wore when you put out the bins – but, still, I thought they looked good. Handsome, rather than cute. Slightly 1960s, even in the 70s and 80s. My mum changed her hairstyle a