Coming to terms with the quirks of ageing

AT what age do you get odd? Because mark my words, you will get odd. At some point, your personal peccadillos, quirks, twitches, small obsessions will become more important to you than always needing to make a good impression.

So you’ll just go ahead and twitch away and cock a snook to the world. In fact you’ll even feel more comfortable about using the phrase ‘cock a snook’. I recommend using it once a day for a healthy mind.

Your sense of embarrassment will gradually ebb away with age like the pigment in your hair. I think I’m getting there. I reckon by the time I’m 40 I’ll be a full blown Dad regardless of whether I’m a father or not. Today I wore sandals with long trousers and it’s only a matter of time before the white socks join the party.

Oddness is not new. It’s merely a return to a natural state of being. As children most of us were odd. I was afraid of banana skins and tried to hide peas under my bed. Then socialisation kicks in and some of us temporarily abandon our oddness, which is a pity. Perhaps there’s an evolutionary reason for this. The tribe had no role for those who tried to see how many clicky noises they could make with their tongue or blow spit-bubbles when there were mastodons to be driven off cliffs.

The internet has been a boon for the odd because we can confess to doing something and there will somewhere be a community of people who embrace you. So you would have seen me openly espouse my obsession for rainfall radar charts a few columns ago, safe in the knowledge there were ‘others out there’. Emboldened by that experience you might as well know that I spend half an hour a day transfixed by a website that marks all the lightning strikes in Europe in real-time with little clicks. (Blitzortung.org in case you were wondering. I know some of you were.)

It felt good to get that secret out there. So I might as well tell you I like wrapping my knuckles off the little metal chimes on the underside of the escalator that’s intersecting with your one, my clicky neck will see me make alarming head movements at inappropriate times and ... I blow spit bubbles when no one’s looking.

However, I’m still in the in-between period before complete oddness so I make some concessions to society in order to cover up other habits. If push comes to shove, I will eventually have to step on a crack in the pavement — despite the risk to my mother spine — rather than knock over a child who is in the way. If caught talking to myself, I pretend it is the spoken word bit of a song which I then proceed to sing. (Usually anything by Boys 2 Men.) It’s more socially acceptable to sing to yourself rather than talk to yourself. But surely it makes more sense to be muttering, “I mustn’t forget to get toilet paper” while wandering through the supermarket rather than singing Will.I.Am’s “Feeling Myself”.

Despite that, unevenness is coming and I embrace it. Awkwardly.