Help: in 16 years, I’m 70. My first 16 years seemed to last forever

I was listening to some Radio 4 cultural show, when Time - actual Time, with a capital “T" - came and booted me in the privy regions. The panel were discussing Kurt Cobain’s legacy. This April, you see, marks 30 years since his death.

I actually had to go outside and take a walk. Not because I was overcome with grief - despite remaining a devoted fan to this day - but because I couldn’t quite comprehend how 30 years had passed since me and about half my generation spent days in shock at the pointless squandering of such talent.

Thirty years ago, my girlfriend and I were talking about getting hitched. Today, we’re married 29 years. Who stole my youth?

Not long before Cobain died, I saw Nirvana play. It’s the most vivid memory, yet I can barely recall what I was doing last month.

Radio 4 had me contemplating my own coffin again, like some latter-day Ebenezer Scrooge, with another show, this time about Pulp Fiction. It’s also 30 years old. How? Why is this happening?

Well, I know why: time moves in a straight line which ends with me in a bath-chair pushed around by some robot nurse.

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 It feels like I watched Pulp Fiction yesterday. I remember berating my editor at the time demanding I review it, as only my generation could understand it’s importance. Ah, youth’s wonderful arrogance.

Today, I can still enjoy Pulp Fiction as a well-made movie, but jeezo the attitudes are cringe. It makes me feel like I’m from another era.

In fact, I am from another era: another century. The more I think about this, the more horrible, ineluctable arithmetic unfolds in my head.

I was born in 1970. The same amount of time has passed between my birth and today, as passed between the Battle of the Somme and when I was born. This shouldn’t be allowed.

Even my name dates me to another time. I’m named after Neil Armstrong. My mum discovered she was pregnant around the time the big man landed on the Moon. Spain had a fascist dictatorship until I went to primary school.

Social media is forever casting me into doom-spirals about mortality. A meme did the rounds recently asking for your first memory of a news story. Mine: the fall of Saigon. I was five.

Someone said their first memory was also aged five: Obama becoming US President. What? That’s your first memory? How’s this possible? I know, I know … time’s arrow and all that, but c’mon on, it’s getting ridiculous.

The thing is, though, I’m not one of these grizzly old greybeards who thinks that because I’ve been around the block a few millions times, I know everything and ‘the kids’ know naff all.

Quite the reverse. See this world we’re living in? Us daft oldies made it: this is the product of slacker GenX and our insane Baby-boomer parents.

Pity GenX, we were too busy being cool to fix the world. As poor Kurt sang in Smells Like Teen Spirit - a true anthem of a generation: ‘Here we are now, entertain us.’ That’s all we wanted: a good time.

Who can blame us? We grew up with the Cold War and the Black and White Minstrel Show. Why wouldn’t we want Ecstasy and MTV? That’s why we created the Second Summer of Love in 1988 … and never really recovered.

Meanwhile, our boomer elders snaffled everything up their ISAs, raised the drawbridge and voted Brexit. Well, not all, clearly - but enough. Forgive my age pushing me towards hyperbole, but apparently that’s a symptom.

It’s my two beautiful children, though, who give me the greatest shudders at Time’s remorseless maw gobbling me up. They’re now past the 25-year mark. Those quarter centuries matter. Age will soon stalk them too, the monster.

Twenty-five years before I was born, my grandmother was pushing my mum’s pram through the rubble of the east-end of London in 1945.

John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction (Image: Mirimax)

It makes my brain throb to think how time changes our world, from war and poverty to peace and prosperity, then from peace and prosperity to war and poverty again.

These endless cycles that humanity seems to keep perpetuating. Why do we go round and around in circles, instead of marching forward, making every year better than the last?

My children are now victim to a side-hustle my fear of mortality has invented: my longing for grandchildren. I quietly infuriate them with lines like: “So when are you thinking of having kids?”

Evidently, 50-somethings staring at the smoking ruins of their youth should run the other way from grandparenthood, as it seems to prophesise the ultimate decline and fall, but I’m going straight towards it.

Having children was the best thing that ever happened to me. I want another spin, this time with kids I can return at 5pm before a nice glass of Picpoul.

Age scares me. Yet if age is handled correctly, it’s something to cherish, not fear. If the generations get it right, young and old can learn from each other. A wee bit of wisdom from us creatures from the 1970s, plus a wee bit of youthful verve and ambition. A nice combo. Why do we never learn that?

And age adds pep to life. You know that feeling at house parties when it’s long gone midnight and there’s only a few hours of debauchery left until everyone goes home or collapses? That’s kind of how being 50-plus feels.

I’ve got stuff to do. In 16 years, I’m 70. I’m screaming inside writing that. My first 16 years seemed to last forever.

April is indeed the cruellest month, but remember how Eliot finishes that line. April, he writes, comes “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain”. I told you the old misery was always right.