Viva Lewes Issue #120 September 2016

COLUMN
David Jarman
On turning 60
To Purley, for my
sister’s seventieth
birthday celebrations.
I suppose
most people when
they think of
Purley, in as much
as they think about
it at all, associate
the place solely
with Jacqueline du
Pré and Ikea. Or,
perhaps, just Ikea.
Although I was born in Croydon I spent most of
my childhood in Purley. It isn’t, I would have to
concede, a particularly exciting place. And yet,
somewhere that is mentioned in a Michelangelo
Antonioni film surely can’t be entirely devoid of
interest. But it wasn’t so much memories of an
idyllic pre-Ikea Purley that my sister’s seventieth
evoked (for me it was always a rather ‘nothing,
like something, happens anywhere’ sort of place)
as reflections on the observance of birthdays in
general.
Making a bit of a fuss over a seventieth birthday
seems entirely reasonable. Three-score-and-ten,
and all that. But in the last eighteen months I’ve
been invited to no fewer than four sixtieth birthday
parties. I even went to a couple of them. But
why sixty in particular? When my wife passed
sixty it never occurred to me to mark the occasion
in any special way. After all, if the Chinese
poem translated by Arthur Waley as On Being
Sixty is anything to go by, it’s those reaching
seventy who might need cheering up with a bit
of a jolly. As the poet writes:
Between thirty and forty, one is distracted by
the five Lusts,
Between seventy and eighty, one is a prey to a
hundred diseases,
But from fifty to sixty
one is free from all
ills.
Still, as I approach my
own sixtieth I wonder
vaguely whether
there’s something
I ought to be doing
about it.
I ask the advice of
the Viva Lewes office
staff, and elicit a, to
me, truly alarming response from the publisher.
She tells me that any birthday that has a nought
in it is sufficient cause for a special celebration.
And she manages to give me the impression that
this is simply common knowledge.
Is it different in other countries? Patrick
Modiano’s novel Une jeunesse begins with Odile’s
thirty-fifth birthday party. Her partner Louis’
thirty-fifth is a few weeks away. One of the
guests says ‘this is a special day. You don’t turn
thirty-five every day.’ Louis asks Odile ‘what’s
it like being thirty-five?’ But then, puzzlingly,
Odile muses to herself: ‘This is the first time in
their life that they are celebrating one of their
birthdays. It’s a silly thing to do, but maybe the
children will like it…’ The first time? Why?
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you. The novel never
mentions it again.
Thirty-five? Seventy? Once every thirty-five
years? The narrator of Samuel Beckett’s short
story First Love muses on the date of his birth:
‘The day itself comes back to me, when I put
my mind to it, and I often celebrate it, after my
fashion, I don’t say each time it comes back, for
it comes back too often, but often.'
That sounds about right to me.
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