The Irritations of Modern Life 25: Age Obsession

ONCE UPON a time, when life was a less subtle and overwrought affair, the facts about age were simple. You were young, then you were middle-aged, then you were old. And that was that.

Nowadays, to all intents and purposes, this rigid structure has loosened up. Today you can be blissfully unattached at 30 and a sex symbol at 70. You can be a granny at 32 or a first-time mother at 42, a maths graduate at 15 or a student at 65. My dear, it seems anything goes.

Except, of course, that it is also the subject of great scrutiny. People purport to applaud that an older woman can go about with a young blade; but that this is still so worthy of mention that the age of both will be pruriently dwelt upon, even while everyone is saying how unimportant it is, shows that our ideas have changed less than we think.

We are, in fact, obsessed with age, far more than hitherto. It is impossible to read a news item about a man rescuing a cat without learning how old he is. It is impossible not to know the age of every actor, footballer and politician who features in our daily lives. And this is a knowledge that we seem to crave - as if, more than anything else, it enables us to place people - to envy or dismiss them.

Of course, our society is obsessed with youth, but also with what every "age" signifies - ie it is fine to be unattached, but not if you are in the second half of your thirties. Regardless of the state of your psyche or your triceps, then you are no longer a sexy singleton but a sad spinster. This sounds as though age obsession applies only to women; yet I lately met a man who disliked admitting to being 29. Perhaps it is fine to fiddle about with your PlayStation, but not if you are nearly 30.

Every little block of time has its own little set of images of what is appropriate and what is not. No wonder people are driven, more and more, to the ultimate idiocy of lying about their age. Who can blame them, when the word "forty" sets off the clanging of collective alarm bells.

People once went from young to middle-aged to old, unfussed whether bra- lessness was acceptable at 33; now we are allowed to cheat this inexorable process. Balzac would no longer write of a "vieille dame de trente ans"; today, with her Espree Club body and Eve Lom complexion, she'd be his heroine.

But she, in some atavistic part of herself, doesn't see it as her mirror does. She knows - just as her man does - that fertility is fading and muscle mass is dissipating. She knows that she is playing tricks on age, and age could find her out. Hence the need to know that other people are - or look - older, the fear that other people are - or look - younger. Hence the obsession with youth, itself free from this obsession.

Understandable, perhaps. But how ghastly, really, that age should have become our collective enemy in this way. After all, what is the point in striving to live longer, when every added year is simply something to wish away?