Róisín Ingle: My schoolfriend is turning 50. Urgh, just urgh

My friend turns 50 tomorrow. She’s gazing down the barrel of that birthday feeling a heady mix of fear and loathing with a fair twist of disappointment. If 50 were a cocktail she’d call it a Fiftini. It would arrive, she insists, both stirred and shaken, and the hangover would be horrendous.

My friend would never willingly order such a thing. What she’d really like is a Timetraveltini so she could go back and live even a few of those years over again. Chance would be a fine thing.

Life moves pretty fast, as the man said. My friend from school is going to be 50, and I have turned into the kind of person who gets her steps in

I should point out that my friend does not look 50. She’d pass for 35 even without her newfound ability to do a highly Instagrammable smoky eye. But that is beside the point. Not looking like 50 slightly softens the blow of the Big Five Oh, but not enough to make any tangible difference: 50 is 50 is 50.

There are fewer good years left ahead, by anybody’s calculations, than there are behind. No amount of expertly applied winged black eyeliner can disguise that fact.

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Being a rubbish friend in the remembering-people’s-birthdays department I hadn’t anticipated we’d be having a “oh God, 50, how and I mean why, urgh just urgh” conversation.

I am not prepared. I do not have a smoky eye. Just a sunburnt nose, an oversized T-shirt and leggings that sag at the knee.

I have spent much of the day “trying to get my steps in”, which is such a stereotypical, not-far-off-50 thing to say that I am cringing as I type this. I have a newly purchased “activity tracker” on my wrist. It tells me I’ve done nearly 3,000 steps and I’d be delighted except that is half the number of steps my mother does on a slow day. She’ll turn 81 this week.

For some bizarre reason she is not full of existential angst about her birthday. She was positively glowing when she turned 80 last year at the party we organised in bucolic Airfield Estate surrounded by her eight children, their partners and her 18 grandchildren.

I must remember to ask my mother why she wasn’t distraught about the Big Eight Oh and then tell my friend what she says. It may help. But it just as likely may not.

Life moves pretty fast, as the man said. My friend from school is going to be 50, and I have turned into the kind of person who gets her steps in. My friend is way too cool for an activity tracker. She is wearing a combat hoody, her colourful tattoos poking out from under the sleeves. She is on TikTok but instead of posting irritating dance moves she assembles Ikea cabinets. She doesn’t need reading glasses or have grey hair or say “oof” when she sits down or gets up from a chair. I do all these things and I am only 49 next birthday. Life moves pretty fast and also life is so unfair.

I might have chosen somewhere fancier for us to meet had I remembered her birthday. Instead, in my ignorance, I book a table in a pub down one of Dublin’s back lanes. (Booking a table in a pub is another of the things we’ve learned to do in 2020 that will never not feel strange.)

We may not have much else in common with Naomi Campbell, but, like her, we are alive and breathing and growing older through a pandemic

We spot the cultural icon and former RTÉ newsreader Anne Doyle in the bar and restrain ourselves from asking for a selfie, which feels depressingly mature. Very 50.

To cheer my friend up I buy her pints of cider, which we used to drink as teenagers. I buy bowls of chunky chips. We open sachets of ketchup and slather it all over them. We talk about our past and our present and our fiftysomething future, which was once so far away and is now, inexplicably, rudely here.

“Sure, aren’t you alive?” She can hear her father’s voice. He always said the same thing when in the past she moaned about 29 and 39, and now, at 49, on the cusp of 50, she knows he’ll say it now. Aren’t you alive?

He’s not here in the pub in the lane so I say it instead. I tell her it’s an achievement. That there are probably more people in the world that don’t reach 50 than manage to get to half a century. Because my actuary sister is probably reading this, I should point out that I made up that last fact but I am convinced there’s something approaching truth in there.

Naomi Campbell turned 50 in May and told Hello! magazine that she’s embracing her age. The supermodel feels “blessed” and “grateful” just to be “living and breathing”.

We may not have much else in common with Naomi, but, like her, we are alive and breathing and growing older through a pandemic.

We’re doing it our way. We’re drinking cider and eating chips. We’re laughing so hard we may have an accident. We’re telling each other secrets we’ll keep forever. We’re celebrating the multilayered miracle of lifelong friendship.

We’re doing all this while maintaining a Covid-appropriate social distance. But when we say our goodbyes we forget everything we’ve been told through the longest six months of our lives. We hug. Accidentally on purpose. Because we haven’t seen each other since before lockdown. Because my friend is about to knock back an unwanted Fiftini. Because I’m a woman with an activity tracker.

And because – say it loud and say it proud – sure, aren’t we alive?

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]