Life Begins At Forty

I remember the day I turned forty. We’re in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. Autumn. The day was dry, some sun. I was walking with Cath around the sweeping curve of Mount’s Bay from Penzance towards Marazion. At low tide it was possible to patter across the sand and mud barefoot, to foreshorten the distant view down towards the Lizard peninsula, the farthest Southerly point of the country, and put the town of Penzance and the moorlands that flanked it into better perspective.

At other times the coastal path, shared here with a cycleway, was the main route of travel. Sea to the right of you, the railway line to the left and beyond that the main road into and out of the town. All routes were good. The scale of view was pleasingly vast, but never overwhelming. Milky skies were the best – or at night you wanted the clouds to disperse so you could see the moon reflected back as a shimmering mirage that rose up from among the waves. Winter storms offered other compelling views, but we were too early in the season for those.

I don’t remember which route we took that day. For lunch we stopped at a pub that fronted on to the coastal path. From inside, there was a large conservatory that offered fantastic views of the sea and in the near distance the fairy tale castle features of St Michael’s Mount. The pub was reasonably full for an out of season weekday, populated by the locally retired and a few straggling tourists. I don’t remember what we ate, a snack of some kind and a pint of beer. There were posters on the walls and other memorabilia to entertain us. I can picture the scene in general, but I can’t pick out all the details, like a man who is gradually losing his sight.

As fate would have it, I had a job interview the next day and so options for celebrating this landmark birthday were limited. A local walk during the day. A single drink or two at the pub. That night we stayed in, cooked pasta bake and ate it in the company of a random episode of The Simpsons. (I was, as you recall, TV-less at this point. Streaming services were still several years away. All we had to entertain us, aside from the multitude of books and ourselves, were random episodes of this popular cartoon series that we had downloaded from illicit file sharing websites). After that it was probably an early night.

*

I had arrived in Cornwall five years earlier, jobless, burnt out from a brief career in the charity industry that had ebbed and flowed and then ceased abruptly in a Christmas Eve redundancy. Temp work had at some stage brought me to the local council where I spent a couple of summer months in the finance department. A year later I was reassigned, this time to planning. Here I acted as general administration. Answering the phones. Sorting the mail. Filing documents. Typing up letters and reports for some of the older members of staff who had started life in the days of typing pools and couldn’t quite bring themselves to type their own documents even though they now had access to a computer at their desk.

I seemed to become invaluable by the simple process of turning up on time each day when required and completing efficiently whatever tasks were assigned to me. I had after a while become a de facto extra member of the department – the same role that Billy Preston had acquired for himself with the late era Beatles.

But now I was being headhunted from within. The forward planning department (soon to be more grandly repurposed as Sustainable Development) needed an extra member of staff. This offered a three year contract, guaranteed hours and a more ‘sustainable’ future. There was a fee to be paid to buy out my contract with the temp agency, but they were prepared to pay that.

I still had to be interviewed though. The post had to be advertised externally. There were protocols to be followed, but at the same time it felt like they wanted me, and the rest was just a box ticking exercise. Almost as though it were not so much I that was applying for the job, but the job that was applying for me. In some ways this made me more nervous, like turning up to an exam when you’ve been given the answers in advance but you still somehow fear you’ll screw it up.

So I had to set off sober on the morning after my fortieth, trying to appear nonchalant in a suit when I had worked in those same offices for several years, always in more casual clothing. The interview was painless as I recall. I tried to say the right things. The position was to be a job share – two people doing the work of one and a half – both working a four day week. That was my attempt at keeping half an opening for my writing career. I’d also negotiated a month’s break before taking on the job (if successful) to finally sit down and write that elusive first novel.

The true birthday celebrations took place that evening after the interview. I wouldn’t know for another day whether I had got the job, but it no longer mattered if I got drunk in the meantime. I took Cath to a local and well regarded fish restaurant by the harbour. (There were suitable vegetarian options for me). I even gave the suit a second airing of the day, at her request. It was a very grown up affair for someone who never really grew up. On the way back we passed a random work colleague – they’d doubtless never seen me in a suit and I think there was a raised eyebrow as we passed in opposite directions.

The tide was in and the harbour looked beautiful that night, the lights of the town glowing softly against the water. I wasn’t an events person, a counter of milestones. I went with the flow. I had no sense of where that would take me next. The job vacancy still to be offered and accepted. The five weeks leave before I took up the position. The beard I grew as I chiselled away with limited success at my novel. The push and pull as autumn turned to winter. The looming knowledge that at Christmas Cath would be returning to Canada. None of that was present in the still, evening air of a quiet seaside town at the end of the line, out of season, its streets mostly deserted. And me, one day older than forty.

What a place to be.