“There were a lot of times in the 90s,” Kate Moss said to Vogue last week, “when I was young, free, single, no responsibilities apart from getting to work … other than that, the world was my oyster.” The model was reflecting on turning 50, as she did on Tuesday, celebrating in Paris with her daughter, Lila, and 35 friends.
One of the smartest decisions Moss ever made was that she would almost always never give interviews, and that remark to Vogue was no exception; even though there are words, what is she actually saying? That the world is no longer her oyster? That she is no longer young, free or single (she has been going out with Nikolai von Bismarck since she was 41)? Or something else, something more “no regrets” – the 90s were then and this is now, and the preciousness of the past is that it can’t be relived?
Welcome to your 50s; it’s complicated.
I turned 50 last August, here’s what I know. A lot of people worry about how they look, whether they could still pass for anything beginning with a four. I think people are daft on this subject: if you’re concentrating, you can read a person’s age in their eyes, precisely. You can see how much they’ve seen. The rest of the stuff, the day-to-day degradation, is second-order. But none of that will detain Moss anyway, any more than you’d catch Cleopatra worrying about her crow’s feet.
The other thing people worry about a lot is how to mark the event, which feels so seismic: you can’t lay low, because you look like a coward or as if you’re in denial. Do you want to celebrate with everyone you’ve ever met? Your eight closest friends? Do you still have eight friends, or did you mislay a few when you went teetotal? To mark the event quietly feels like surrender. But acting like you’re 21 will land you in A&E.
A friend of mine manages an event place in Scotland, and they’ve banned 50ths. Hen nights, stag dos, 40ths, no problem: but some combination of the manic nihilism that sweeps over people and the middle-aged mal-coordination that crept up on them leads to a wild amount of breakage. Whatever the party anxiety is, and however overwhelming it feels, it’s useful as a displacement emotion. The proximal moment of becoming 50 is, in the end, a lot less terrifying than the point it marks in your life, a whole half-century lived, probably somewhat less than that to come.
It’s weird: I never understood people fretting about their landmark birthdays. People used to worry about turning 30 because that was the deadline for the life stuff: had you found anyone resembling a plausible life partner, did you have a place to live? But that felt random, artificial. Forty, meanwhile, was theoretically when you were meant to face up to what you probably wouldn’t now achieve, whether that was having children or becoming a neurosurgeon. Again, it felt like the kind of milestone a magazine had dreamed up, rather than a real thing that everyone would reliably experience at the same time. Which isn’t to say that those deadlines and regrets don’t exist, rather that they’re more likely to punch you in the face at some weird time, probably 43 and a half.
Fifty has a different pull, and it’s undeniable. One friend called it sniper’s alley, this decade; suddenly, there is always someone falling ill; always someone dying. Another friend got really irked by that image, saying it was too violent. We had a three-way row about whether that’s what life was, violence – and this is not how we spent our time in the 2010s, arguing about life’s essence and the meaning of pain. You start thinking in units of time you have left, doing weird maths. My dad died at 64, which is only 14 years away. Fourteen years ago, I was saying no way would Labour lose the election. It seems so unspeakably long ago, and yet at the same time, like it was yesterday.
Everywhere you look, your contemporaries are reading that James Hollis book, The Middle Passage: from misery to meaning in midlife. You really don’t want to join them – you don’t have time to look for meaning, you can’t even find your keys. It sounds arduous and inconvenient.
Unarguably, though, mortality is interesting; time has more consequence when it’s running out. Conflict is dramatic to watch but boring to live; urgency is dramatic to live. You thought you were playing Scrabble, but actually you’re playing Boggle. Which, you have to admit, is the better game.
