Imagine a world where you’re no longer sexy.

A world where your clothes fit in new and surprising ways and your style’s laughable or, worse, coming back into fashion and, perhaps, not for the first time. It’s a place where you can no longer dance without exciting derision or eat a meal without finding potato in your eyebrows. You can’t see, hear, retain short-term memories, suppress long-term ones and need to decide whether to fasten your belt above or below your belly. Suddenly advertisers want you to know about the plight of over-worked donkeys and the availability of a small door into your bathtub, designed for easy, comfortable and secure bathing. You’re in a Dorian Gray nightmare, staring into the mirror and seeing wickedness and degeneracy carved into your once blameless features in a bathroom crammed with piles of pills, oodles of unguents, preparations and palliatives, all the salves required to help you slip through the day with the least amount of friction, always aware that, despite your forward planning, nothing will be smooth: you’ll catch a thread on a rusty nail, take a splinter to the cuticle, become trapped in the disabled toilet. You pull the cord, but still no one comes.

Sounds rubbish, doesn’t it?

Because you remember another world, a phantom planet of elastic joints and snap-back skin, of smouldering eyes and shit-eating grins, the sensation of having time to spare, to squander, to piss up the wall, and an endless series of mistakes to be made, lined up like dominos waiting for the gentlest whisper of a kiss of a nudge before falling. Mistakes you could still afford to make, some of which might be extremely enjoyable. This world squats in the memory, tantalisingly out of reach. It’s the world of youth, and you can never go home again because you’re old now and that’s where you’ll live until you stop living.

Pretty scary, isn’t it? Your eyesight’s growing dim as the world closes about you, and opportunities recede like your salt and pepper hairline.

You’re going to need help. You’re going to need a friend to guide you through this gradual disintegration.

Hello.

I am that friend.

I can’t stop you ageing—I’m not a billionaire firing a rocket made of monkey glands at the moon—but, hopefully, I can ease your passage through this turbulent, transitional period which will be taking up the rest of your life.

Join me. I’ll be using the terrible things that have ravaged my body as a sort of universal template for the privations of ageing. I shall be the prism of decrepitude through which you will come to see yourself.

This book could also be a primer for young people perhaps taking their first, tentative steps into growing older. We’re all doing it. From the cradle to the grave, we’re all on the same continuum. There is, so far, only one direction. Time travel may be just around the corner, but when it comes, if it comes, it won’t be for the likes of you and me. The super-rich will be slipping willy-nilly into the past, back to a time where everything wasn’t on fire, under water, or chock full of the microplastics they got rich from. They won’t be reading this book because they don’t read books. They dictate them.

When you’re young you love the idea of ageing: “You’ll see. When I’m old, I won’t have to wash at all. I’ll be living the dream, like Robert F Kennedy Junior. When I’m old, I won’t have to go to school, or go to bed, and you can’t push me around. Then you’ll see.”

No, you’ll see. People will never stop pushing you around and you’ll be begging to go to bed any time you can because you’re crying out for sleep. But sleep won’t come. Because of the insomnia, because of your prostate, blown up like a whoopie cushion—a real Bronx cheer—and because of the busy fizziness of the hornet’s nest anxiety crammed into your throbbing skull. Even when you do snatch after a few wisps of precious sleep, it will be curdled by dread, by the choking spectre of unresolved guilt, by the squatting night-hag of wasted potential, and the squandered drip, drip, drip of days you can no longer be certain you’re entitled to. Will my passport outlive me? My debit card? That pint of milk in the fridge? Look at those smug, showboating Mayflies. They have their whole lives ahead of them.

I’m making massive assumptions, of course. Not everyone’s experience will be the same as mine. It very much depends on your circumstances. Wealthy people currently enjoy an extra nine years of “healthy living” compared to the poor, and it looks as though that gap is going to widen. As I’m writing this, in 2025, in the United Kingdom, the political party currently leading all the polls is actively looking to dismantle the National Health Service. If they do, not only will it mean the erasure of the greatest thing the UK ever did for its people, but it will also have an incredible impact on a society beginning to see unbridgeable disparity in the wealth of its population.

So, I don’t know. Maybe in as little as five or ten years, my experience of living will seem like some mythical golden age, where you didn’t have to mortgage your home to pay for your insulin. Or maybe it’s symptomatic of my old age: my fear of change, my fading relevance, a fatal misunderstanding of braver, newer worlds, and my tortoise-like retreat into a cosy shell, with all my DVDs and records, all the physical media that keeps me warm and complacent, the books built around me like a defensive wall. An Englishman’s tome is his castle, after all. These days, I’m a dust trap, not a thirst trap.

Perhaps this book will be obsolete before it’s published. Before it’s written, even. But I doubt it. People have been ageing for ages. I’m doing it while I’m writing this. You’re doing it while you’re reading it. Who says you can’t multitask? Human beings are born, they get distracted, they wither and die. We’re finite. We run out of juice. We return to the earth; our energy dispersed to the universe once again. Our lives are a blip. Our usual, near constant state, is just energy. We’re self-aware lightbulbs. Perhaps you believe in life after death? Great. Good for you. But I won’t really be covering any of that, at least not directly. In this book we’re only interested in your brief sojourn in this vale of tears or, if you’re doing it right, this vale of cheers.

We’re not here long. Let’s enjoy it.