Delusion

I went to King Street, Newtown the other day - a street close to Sydney University and therefore pretty much devoted to the young. Instead of feeling middle aged and out of place, I imagined I was one of them. Again yesterday at a theatre matinee (was it sacrilegious to go to the theatre on the Anzac Day holiday?) I put on my glasses and looked at the crowd of total wrecks in the foyer and imagined I wasn't anything to do with them.

Of course, it's the need for glasses that allows me to continue in my belief that I am still quite youthful. If I don't wear them, the world takes on the same hazy quality it had during my teenage years, which I spent smoking too much of the wrong types of things (although is there a right type of thing to smoke?) And when I look in the bathroom mirror without them, I could be any age - or, indeed anyone (although not yet anything - I can still distinguish a vaguely humanoid shape from a cupboard.)

Unlike me, my fellow audience members yesterday all seemed to have resigned themselves quite well to maturity. Most of the women - and the crowd was mostly female - had chopped off their hair and allowed themselves to grow quite stout. If that's what it takes to acknowledge you are ageing, I will never do it. And if I start to spread vastly, I intend to buy a whalebone corset. I shall not go wobbling into that good night - or only wobbling drunkenly in the mode of the man who wrote the original of that line (I may be wrong but it was Dylan Thomas, I think?)