There are junctures in life when some distant voice, an ancestral ripple, warns a chap that he is not the object of his darling’s keenest desires – at least, not at that very moment.
Any doubts still lurking about this in the old brain’s fuzzy core were dispelled when I entered the study with a steaming mug of tea for my gorgeous wife, who had stretched her slender legs down the leather folds of the chair in a most fetching pose, while gripping the phone with white- knuckled passion.
Spread on the desk was a magazine featuring a young man with a stern expression and the sort of deep blue stare that suggested the chink of ice cubes in a cocktail glass. He had in that second emerged, dripping, from the briny in swimming trunks that hugged his bottom with a tightness rarely seen on British shores – and thank heavens for that small mercy, if I may be so bold.
“Here’s your tea, sweetheart,” I said, placing the mug a few inches above the alarming picture, though my wife seemed to be far away, in the embrace of a dream, as rain from the Birkenhead sky punished the copper leaves drooping beyond our window. But, in the gathering grey of that Sunday afternoon, I could just hear my sister-in-law’s voice on the other end of the phone repeating those words “snake hips”.
“Ooooooh, yes,” said my wife, “and so firm and taut.”
Those with an ear for detail would have noted then that the Os in the “ooh” rolled to some faraway horizon like the wheels on racing bicycles. During the course of such telephone calls between these sisters, both of whom are much younger than me, my own hips come under scrutiny, before they are affectionately likened not to a snake, but to a ripe pear.
“The poor old sausage,” says my wife, rapidly promoting me from puckered fruit to grilled meat, and then she lowers her voice to a whisper, “he’s starting to slow down, you know.”
Even in what was humorously described as my “prime”, the fish would have been dabbing tears of mirth from their gills if I had frolicked in the sea in trunks like those worn by Daniel Craig as James Bond. But one of the great joys of growing older is that you no longer care. You look in the mirror and smile and wave at the codger gawping back, as you would to a vaguely familiar face on the opposite pavement, and then you ask yourself in some bemusement, is that really me? You close your eyes and in the sweet mirror of the imagination, you appear again, as you were, and that is how you will stay all day.
There are some in their middle years, who push against time by going to the gym to regain their snake hips or six-pack tummies – or they step gingerly into the young people’s boutique, or they learn the argot of the street or they consult a wigmaker. But time races on just the same. And I’ll let you into a little secret here – if you stop worrying, you start being young again. For the zest in your step can be charged by spirit, as well as blood and bone.
A couple of weeks ago, I returned to The Cavern for a concert given by Billy Kinsley, formerly of the superb Merseybeats and Liverpool Express, to promote a new CD and his biography, written by Spencer Leigh, the peerless broadcaster and authority on popular music. Of course, the old club sweated as it always does, and the sweat that night was scented with the memories of people who will stay forever young. So they jigged and drank and sang the choruses of songs that have entered the nation’s everlasting soul and they are the songs of the young.
“I feel rejuvenated,” I said to my wife later that night. “I like you just the way you are,” she replied, the lovely turquoise glowing in her eyes. “You old duffer.”
LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcasts at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk
