On being 40

On being 40

Back when we were kids we would always know when to stop

And now all the good kids are messing up

Nobody has gained or accomplished anything

 – Mew, Comforting Sounds

Sky over the university, October 2025.

Most estimates for Germany and the UK put life expectancy for men at just over 80. Considering my general state of health, which is probably just about in the lower 50% of the male population, it's safe to think of my fortieth birthday – which came upon me in May – as the curtain falling on the first half of my life (if I'm lucky and don't get hit by a bus or somesuch). The audience may, if they wish, buy an ice cream and perhaps a souvenir programme, answer the call of nature if necessary, then return to the auditorium in good time for the second half to begin.

To say that one's fortieth invites reflection is understating the case. A better analogy would be to say that that reflection, which has been sneaking up on me for a while, has now jumped in front of me, made itself comfortable in my home uninvited, and is proceeding to whack me on the forehead.

This blog has been running since 2004, which is more than a quarter of my life. When I initiated it, I was a greasy teenager who'd just started his first year as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and mostly posted complete nonsense. That greasy teenager was largely apolitical, and didn't "give a monkey's about the outside world except insofar as it directly concerns me". He was up to lots of odd things like having "children", making pasta sauces out of Actimel and brown sugar, and staging Oscar Wilde's plays in primary schools. But he had a fire in his (greaseproof?) belly, too: he despised the EU (for reasons that mostly didn't make much sense), and he didn't think much of "a nice life". By that he meant "To live in a nice house, spend the extra money to buy top quality brands instead of 'saver' varieties, no longer buy Christmas cards at £1 for 100, travel first class sometimes on trains", etc. Greasy teenager George would probably be impressed that I was a professor in Germany, but very unimpressed that I now do all of the aforementioned things, and indeed have quite "a nice life". Maybe he'd be mollified by the fact that I donate a fair proportion of my income to charity, or maybe, like present-day me, he'd suspect that that's just the fee to assuage a guilty conscience.

None of this is to say that 2004-6 me was a completely different person. We both have nasty hayfever, love chocolate, languages and trains, and dislike cars and bureaucracy, for instance. And one thing that 2005 me has in common with present-day me is that we very much like the Danish band Mew https://troutworthy.blogspot.com/2005/09/and-glass-handed-kites.html. I first saw them probably in 2002, and then not for many years, catching only part of their gig in Manchester circa 2015. In 2024 I set off halfway across Europe, by train and boat, to see Mew performing with the Danish Chamber Orchestra in Helsinki, but they had to cancel. Shortly afterwards, they announced that they were splitting up, and I duly booked for their penultimate ever gig, in Aarhus. This took place six days after my fortieth birthday, on May 29th.

While they've described themselves as "indie stadium", I'd say somewhere between prog and shoegaze would be more accurate, along with such adjectives as soaring, melodic, surreal. They've been around for thirty years, which is not as long as me, but long enough for people to get to know them and their music. I hadn't met a single soul in the Aarhus Congress Centre, but the glee with which these people – some of who know every word of every song – responded to the performance engendered in me a weird feeling of camaraderie. They played lots of their old stuff, including Am I Wry? No, which a quarter of my life ago I described as my favourite song ever, and closed with the anthemic Comforting Sounds.

Mew performing in Aarhus.

There's a lot of childlike wonder in both Mew's music and my reaction to it. That's the sort of thing that society wants to drum out of you by the time you're twenty, let alone forty. But one must resist such cynicism: those moments of the sublime are inestimably precious, to the point where I often think that they may just be all that's worth living for. Certainly they don't come as often to me now as they did twenty years ago, and then already less often than ten years before that; and time, correspondingly, moves much faster now than it did then. The millennial middle-class curse is that in some ways we're not likely to ever have it as good as we did in childhood. It's often maintained that one's teenage years are the best years of one's life, but not for me: in one's teens one is expected to do things that involve engaging one’s core and making sensible use of one's limbs, like dancing, sports and having sex, all of which have only ever made me desperately anxious rather than happy. One advantage of being forty, rather than twenty, is that I've had a lot more time to come to terms with myself, at least.