Ian McMillan: Skip the excuses and let’s keep the years at bay

Skipping is, I reckon, a primitive reaction to the world that we developed as cavepeople. The sabre-toothed tiger hasn’t got us yet? Then let’s skip to the cave like loinclothed kids! Skipping is a constant feature of our childhood but in our teenage years it’s just a face-reddening memory, best forgotten like your Postman Pat tapes and raising your face to be kissed by your Auntie from Gomersal, the one who smelled of beetroot.

Back to my urge to skip. It was quite early in the morning and it was still dark. The road was quiet. I looked around furtively. A light clicked on upstairs in a house and then went off again. A car revved up somewhere in the distance and I heard it drive away. A dog barked in a garden. I began to skip. I skipped. In fact, let’s be clear about this, I skippety-skipped. It felt good, it felt liberating, it felt childlike and pure.

I began to whistle a nice, innocent skipping song. I must have been whistling very loudly because I didn’t hear the car pull up behind me. I didn’t hear the window wind down. I did, however, hear what the driver shouted: “Hey! Act your age not your hat size!”

My whistling died in my throat. I stopped skipping instantly, almost losing my balance as my feet and legs disagreed with each other about just what to do next. I wandered off home, my good mood trickling away down the grate at the side of the road. The skip-interruptor drove away laughing and shouting the phrase again.

Act your age, not your hat size. Very witty. In other words, be 57 not six and a half. I sat down heavily on the settee, sighing like a 57-year-old does. I was trying to act my age, and it was hard. Like most middle-aged people, I think about 15 years younger than I actually am.

Sometimes I tell myself and anybody else who’ll listen (which doesn’t always include me, to be honest) that I feel 21 inside but actually that’s a fib. When I was 21 I was callow and shallow and the opposite of mellow. I reckon adulthood hit me when I was in my early 40s and that’s where I still think I am. My name’s Ian McMillan and I’m 42 years old, even though I was born in 1956.

I’ve also heard that phrase as “‘Act your age, not your shoe size” and “Act your age, not your collar size” and each variation on it just hammers home the simple message: “You’re not as young as you were so don’t act like it. Be the person you’ve grown into being.”

Back on the settee I started to think about the phrase; to, as academics say, unpick it. Act your age, not your hat size. I think it’s a bit too specific. If I act 57, am I really going to be acting any differently to a man of 56 or 58? When I was 43 was I really any different to when I was 42? Each year, as your birthday dawns, do you suddenly feel a little cleverer, a little more enlightened, a little more able to tackle the complexities of the world? No. You just feel a bit older.

I was skipping down to the shops in Darfield because I felt, for a moment, that I was young again and I wanted to celebrate the fact while nobody was looking. You see the fashion equivalent of my skipping when blokes my age suddenly turn up with buzz-saw haircuts and shirts they’ve pinched from their son. Their mates stare at them and one of them says “I didn’t know it was fancy dress!”

You see them embarrassing their kids by trying to talk knowledgably about current music using current slang, and that just ain’t groovy, daddio. Sadly, you see middle-aged people running off and hitching up with a younger woman or man because somehow it makes them feel not quite as old, as though their wrinkles are face-paint and their liver spots are sequins.

I guess that maybe, in the end, we think in decades: our 20s, our 30s, our 40s, each one illuminated by great life events, each one seeping into the other until they’re just like a long sausage of time. A spicy sausage, of course, with lots of interesting flavours, but a sausage all the same.

So why can’t I skip? Why can’t I act my hat size and not my age? One day I won’t be able to skip, and then I’ll wish I’d done it more. Come on, readers of this column: let’s all skip and whistle a skipping song. It’ll keep the years at bay!