Life continues/flood of emotions

I recently came across a couple of inspirational quotes on the subject of turning 40.  The first of these was in the days leading up to my 40th birthday when I was still seeking a measure of reassurance over the approaching milestone.  I took to Microsoft Edge and visited google.co.uk where I searched specifically for “famous quotes about turning 40” since as a society we put much more currency in the experiences of famous people than anybody else.  There weren’t as many comments attributed to celebrities as I hoped there might be, although one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, apparently did once say:  “At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment.”  It was heartening to think that even if I was leaving my decade of wit, I might now at least have a better judgment of when – or when not – to use it.

Equally as inspiring, the second quote came in the form of a statement on the front of a card produced by the Holy Mackerel greeting card company which was presented to me by one of the maiden mothers of our latest pub quiz adversaries, Quiznae Me, and an accidental Tinder match.  Although there was nothing to say that the wisdom was strictly limited to the occasion of a 40th birthday, it was a card given to a man who was celebrating turning 40.  The enormous green text read:  “HAPPY  BIRTHDAY YOU GIN-RADDLED OLD SOAK.”  I guess it has been determined that my forties will either be a time of good judgment or gin, and all that remains is to see which it is.

As October approached, I had for some reason convinced myself that the final days of my thirties were going to be a light procession, similar to the Charities Day parade we used to see during the summer in Oban when I was growing up, only with more corduroy and tweed.  In reality, even on the cusp of one of life’s significant milestones, I was still having to contend with the challenges that come with being a single occupant.  The night before bin collection day, for example, I performed my usual role of taking our block’s three blue recycling bins from the garden out to the pavement for emptying.  There has always been something of a laissez-faire approach to filling the bins, at least as far as I’ve been aware.  I tend to drop my recycling into whichever one other people have been using, which I have always assumed is what everybody else in the block does since the bins are not numbered or marked in any identifying way.  I approached the first receptacle, finding it to be around three-quarters full, and wheeled it through the close to the front of the building.  The next bin was the same – plastic and paper barely halfway up the length of the thing.  I lifted the lid on the final bin expecting that it would be empty and I would be spared the trouble of dragging all three of the things out into the pavement.  But then, like some kind of rubbish fruit machine, the third bin lid dropped with me having seen that there were maybe six inches of material lying on the bottom.  I’m not ordinarily an advocate for capital punishment, but in that moment I would have happily witnessed the responsible party maybe not lose a hand, but certainly have a fingernail badly bruised.

It wasn’t only my bin collection woes which were being recycled in early October.  By the end of the first week, four of the five bulbs in my living room chandelier had expired.  The fifth lightbulb has continued to valiantly light part of the room for several weeks while I muster the enthusiasm to take the stepladder out.  Lightbulbs have been a nemesis of mine since I moved into my flat, especially when the ceilings in the place are so high.  How can it be that four bulbs die within a day or so of one another while the other in the set burns moderately brightly for weeks after?  Six years of research has thus far only told me that dimmer bulbs are not necessarily the smartest lighting option.

On the final day of my thirties I was forced into defrosting my freezer, a monumentally mundane household task that was only made into a mountain by the realisation that I have never considered what other people use to dislodge blocks of ice from their freezer. A look in my kitchen drawer was only a crude version of a hit 1995 single by Alanis Morissette when there were half a dozen spoons when all I needed was a pick. The most suitable tool I could find for the job was a cake slice I had inherited from the previous owner of the flat. It was a chunky silver thing that sent flakes of frost flying across the kitchen when I chipped away at the ice that had built up on the top shelf – as if I was battling the elements on a gruelling Arctic expedition. It’s these things that nobody ever writes about on a 40th birthday card.

For months I agonised over hosting a birthday party for myself since, being someone who is so awkwardly shy that the only reason there isn’t a picture of me next to the dictionary definition of introvert is that I couldn’t face having my photograph taken, I felt uncomfortable with the notion of an event that would be all about me.  Besides, a party for a person’s 40th birthday isn’t anything like, say, the fifth birthday party that your mum organised, when classmates are forced to come along because their parents like your parents and because there is cake.  I worried that if I was to put on my own party the night would trundle by with only my brother and me standing at the bar with our niece, which would be just like any other Saturday night in Aulay’s, only in this instance there would be a girl who actually laughs at the things we say.  Yet, despite those anxieties, I pressed on and invited everyone I know to Soroba House the Saturday after my birthday.

There turned out to be far more interest in the event beyond only my immediate family, and I proceeded with planning ways of making the night appealing to everyone.  As with any celebration, there is always an important person or two who can’t make it.  On this occasion, it was the Doctor of Words who was using the school holidays to take a trip to Ireland.  To compensate for missing the party, she offered to take me out for dinner and pints in Markie Dans the weekend before the big day.  We made a night of it by inviting the formerly raven-haired quiztress and a bird-watching accountant to join us.  In a way, the evening was a kind of initiation into my forties by three of the finest fortysomethings I know.  They have shown me that people in their forties are every bit as attractive, witty, conscientious, and fun-loving as anybody else.  That the Doctor of Words ordered a round of Tequila for the table less than an hour after we arrived surely only confirms Benjamin Franklin’s theory.

During the evening, sometime after we had eaten a portion of salt and chilli chips that was as big as any of our heads, we were joined by a couple of trainee doctors who had recently moved to Argyll from the south of England to further their development.  These young women had smiles that were so sparkling one could be forgiven for believing that they were student dental nurses.  They were fun and easygoing and didn’t seem at all perturbed by sitting at a table with a pageant of fortysomethings.  Of course, much like every woman on the dating apps seems to be, I quickly discovered that they were both really into outdoor activities.  One of the doctors told me about her plans to go white water rafting the following afternoon.  Knowing that Saturday was forecast to see Old Testament levels of rainfall throughout Scotland, I queried whether going rafting on the rainiest day of the year was such a great idea.  With clinical precision, the trainee doctor responded that “I’m going to get wet anyway,” and it was all I could do to nod my head and hope that the beats from Steve-O’s decks would swallow me up.  I didn’t have a clue what to say; whether to be funny or flirty or simply outright admit that I don’t know what the point of white water rafting is.  It was in that moment that I came to realise that at 39 years and 360 days of age, I no longer know how to talk to women who are in their twenties.  However, there was a part of me that wondered when I ever could.

Sure enough, the rain on Saturday morning was unlike anything any of us had seen.  It was coming down more steadily than the new short-term let licence notices have been going up on property doors around town.  By the time I walked around the corner to Lidl, the road was effectively a stream and cars were like jet skis coughing up waves in their wake.  At least a quarter of the supermarket car park was flooded, and this was 10.30am – hours before high tide was due to arrive.  

With my head still swimming in Tequila, I met the rest of my family at the Bridge Cafe.  There was a sort of end of days feel about the place:  it was practically deserted; Halloween decorations dangling from the ceiling, twisting menacingly in the breeze whilst Britney Spears played from a radio in the kitchen.  Over coffee, we revisited my night in Markies and discussed plans for my party the following weekend.  It would be my birthday in midweek, and I mentioned how I would like a repeat of the meal a few of us enjoyed in Bar Rio a year earlier.  My sister made a quip questioning whether I thought of myself as the Queen by holding three separate events celebrating my birthday.  As someone who holds fairly strong Republican beliefs, the zinger was a stinger.  But the truth is that if I could have gotten away with it, I would likely have spent the entire month partying. 

By the time we had quaffed our coffee and ventured back outside, almost the entirety of Lochavullin Road was flooded. The water had travelled all the way down to the bridge and was troubling the lane outside the cafe. We stepped down off the pavement to find that the flow was at least ankle-deep in its shallowest parts. Dad was keen to get to Tesco on the other side of the road, but he was trepidacious to walk through the water. My brother and I insisted that he could get whatever he needed in Lidl, or at least take the long route around to Tesco if necessary, but he wouldn’t listen. He began to shuffle across the bridge, almost in the manner of someone who is learning to walk for the first time, which I suppose in a way we all were. I never thought that I would see the sight of my dad wading through water that was at least shin-high by the time he reached the middle of the road, just to get to Tesco. There was something admirable about it; in that I couldn’t help but wish that I had the kind of desire for something, anything, as my dad had to buy some milk and bread. Still, the depth of the water was getting silly before he could reach his destination, and as soon as he realised that my sister wasn’t going to risk walking across to retrieve her car, he relented and came back to the bridge. It truly seems that nobody can resist the authority of a Les Mills instructor.

The Great Flood of 12pm-10pm 7 October 2023 will live long in the memory of everybody in Oban who survived it.  I can remember standing in the bus shelter at the station with dad waiting for the Soroba bus to arrive as the rain continued to fall without any sign of it ever stopping.  With no sign of the bus at least 30 minutes after its scheduled time, rumours began to spread that it had become stuck at the Corran Halls and wasn’t able to drive up the hill to Dunollie due to flooding.  It was easy to see an armageddon scenario knowing the consternation it causes when people can’t get out of Dunollie.  The relief we felt when it eventually arrived was similar to the euphoria when a barstool facing the television in Aulay’s opens up and there’s a game on that you want to watch.  As the day developed, a deluge of photographs appeared on social media, businesses in some of the worst affected areas were forced to close as water levels rose, while landslides on the roads to the north and south of the town meant that Oban was cut off from the rest of civilisation in the physical sense rather than the figurative way many people usually like to believe.

By the time the day of the 40th anniversary of my birth came around the following Wednesday, the flood was just another one of those things that happen at the weekend and are quickly forgotten about, a phenomenon that becomes easier with age it seems.  It was to my surprise that I awoke in the morning to discover that not only had my body not completely broken down the way I had occasionally feared it might, but rather it felt like it did any other morning – only somewhat sprightly.  A residual rush of energy from my indoor football game on Monday accompanied a spring in my step.  I had scored the finest goal of my fleeting career in the hall at Atlantis, and although there were only nine other people there who witnessed it, it was still nine more than are present any other time I’m scoring.

A group of us arranged to go for dinner at Bar Rio in a sort of recreation of my 39th birthday, only this time we arrived with a no-fern pact – nobody wanted to finish up with soil on their hands from my inability to care for houseplants.  The eight of us managed to unconsciously organise ourselves into a seating plan that was identical to a year earlier, with (much more than just…) the Plant Doctor’s girlfriend taking up the spot vacated by The Algaeman.  After our initial drinks order was taken by a bloke, we were even joined by the same waitress who had previously served us.  Nobody had seen her since she disappeared midway through that last meal following my handcuff remark, so there was some relief to know that she hadn’t skipped town.  The waitress had a knowing smile as she approached our table.  It was easy to see that she recognised us, though there was an unspoken agreement that no-one from our group would attempt to engage in any banter with her lest we ended up going hungry, and she seemed quite comfortable with the unspoken element of the agreement.  I was only a matter of hours into my forties and already the better judgment was coming through.

Having filled our pie holes with pizza, and without this time offending any waiting staff, we ventured forth to the Lorne pub quiz in search of trivia triumph.  It wasn’t without some guilt that I temporarily separated from my usual team, the Unlikely Bawbags, but this was a rare occasion.  It isn’t often that I get to team up with my brother and the Plant Doctor at a quiz without one of them falling asleep before the music round, and never with Dirty Finger, who we hoped would show the same acumen for general knowledge as he does for picking cheesy chart hits at the jukebox.

The main purpose of our one-night-only alliance, however, was to take our rivals Quiznae Me down a peg or two.  Their rise to prominence in the quiz makes me think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the original Ghostbusters film:  a cute and fluffy little character who couldn’t possibly cause any harm to anybody until it suddenly grows to a monstrous size and threatens to crush the entire city before the heroic Ghostbusters cross their streams and melt it down to a puddle of goo.  They had been getting their excuses in early ahead of the quiz, claiming that half of their team was away on holiday and they were going to be down to only two members.  I didn’t believe a word of it.  The whole thing sounded like the days when my niece was younger and I would hide whatever toy she was playing with that day behind my back.  She would protest and I’d insist that I didn’t have the missing toy.  Eventually, once her guard was down, I’d sit the toy atop my head waiting for my niece to notice it, her eyes would widen, and Quiznae Me would win the quiz.

Perhaps the only obstacle I could see to our alliance going all the way and winning the quiz was our inability to agree on a team name.  I quite liked the idea of Traveling Quizburys, but there were a variety of alternatives put forward in our group chat.  Steak Pie: Revisited is always a popular reminder of the disastrous entry the Plant Doctor and I made into the Settle Inn’s quiz in Stirling; Don’t Cross The Streams was our Ghostbusters-themed suggestion, though it is precisely what we were going to have to do to defeat Quiznae Me; A Caricature of a single quiz team and Are stars just pinpricks in the curtain of night (spoken like Sean Connery) were also options.  We hadn’t decided on a name when the silver-haired host came around to ask and we were forced into a panicked 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Things didn’t get any better from there when we were presented with the opening picture round, which was ten photographs of famous places of worship.  When the general knowledge round contained the weekly Celtic-themed question, the Rangers-supporting Dirty Finger began to question whether he had been reeled into some kind of Papal conspiracy.  Despite this, our alliance made a strong start to the quiz.  Indeed, we performed well throughout the entire night.  Yet, to our frustration, there was always one team ahead of us from beginning to end.  A team that had no qualms about denying a 40-year-old man a victory at the pub quiz on his birthday.  It wasn’t Quiznae Me – we crushed them – but, rather, the Unlikely Bawbags.  The very team I had left to join my one-night-only alliance.  It seems that the first lesson of my forties is to never underestimate your bawbags.

I couldn’t let my birthday pass without stopping in to have a drink in Aulay’s, the one place that almost feels as natural as the womb. Being a Wednesday night it was quiet and we had the run of the lounge bar to dissect our quiz defeat and pump the jukebox full of pound coins. It wasn’t long before a pint of Tennent’s was passed through from the public bar accompanied by hushed words from the bar staff. “Doc says happy birthday.” I couldn’t recall ever being bought a pint by Doc before. It feels it would be something a person would remember, like an Old Testament-style flood. More important than that, though, was the question of whether receiving a pint from Doc is an act of congratulations or commiserations.

When I was next in Aulay’s in the hours before the party I had decided to throw for myself, my mind was almost utterly consumed by a comment made to me in the same place the night before.  I was talking to the former barmaid who once believed that my name is Rupert when she told me she planned to come to my party dressed as Lara Croft.  It didn’t seem to phase her when I pleaded that I would likely hardly see five minutes of the night if she turned up in the guise of the Tomb Raider.  There were all manner of things going on around me – Aulay’s had a bottle of Lagavulin behind the bar for the first time in years; the scientist from Swansea University who has strong opinions on shoelaces had travelled down from Skye with his wife; the nut tax man was being sent on a wheeze around town to source balloon weights after the ones I had bought from eBay proved to be defective – yet all I could think about was that damned Lara Croft.

With whisky in our bellies, we sauntered across the road to the taxi rank to catch a ride up to my dad’s on our way to Soroba House.  Cars were at a premium, but in a rare stroke of luck, there was one pulling in just as we arrived.  I sat in the front passenger’s seat for the journey, which was considerably more dry than the same route was a week earlier.  A strong breeze ruffled the branches of the trees in Argyll Square, enticing the driver into invoking page one of the small talk handbook.  “It’s been so windy today,” she observed.  I hadn’t noticed, but the new wisdom that comes with being 40 years old suggested that confessing as much wouldn’t assist in continuing the conversation, so I went with one of my most-used self-depreciating jokes.

“Aye, I spent ages doing my hair this morning and it was all for nothing.” I could feel the driver’s eyes twist from the road to my head, and a faint chuckle followed. “But you don’t have any hair,” she jabbed. I hammed up the feigned indignation, blaming the approaching winter nights for her poor vision and threatening to withhold our fare as she collapsed into hysterics. I reckon it was at some point on that brief journey that I remembered that I was always more into Super Mario Kart anyway.

Despite having organised the thing, nothing could have prepared me for the emotions of walking into my own party, while others seemed unprepared for the harrowing sight of the ‘Green and Glowing Ghostbusters’ cocktail I had ordered for arrival, with the Irish Cream slowly curdling on the surface of the drink.  People had put in such a remarkable effort to make the night memorable, especially my sister and partner who must have inflated more than a hundred balloons, and Oban’s leading purveyor of Irish dance who did so much to help put the ‘jig’ in Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.  As many as 16 would-be DJs added more than 12 hours worth of music to a collaborative Spotify playlist for the event, while Dirty Finger went to the extent of having his friend create an enormous creamy fruit cake centred on a daft throwaway comment I’d made during one of our lockdown beer clubs on Zoom about a particular tipple having the taste of “Babe Ruth smashing berries into your mouth.”

Then there was the grand reveal of the project the no longer raven-haired quiztress had been secretly working on for weeks.  A ray of inspiration had come to her during one of our quiz defeats in September that it would be fun to prepare a Piñata for the party, though she refused to indulge me with the theme of the piece.  I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to what kind of Piñata someone would bring to a 40th birthday party, and so concerned myself more with whether we could get miniature bottles of whisky inside the thing – although that was quickly ruled out on the grounds of safety.  I couldn’t believe it when I arrived at Soroba House and saw the creation swinging from the ceiling in the middle of the room:  a Piñata of my own head, complete with glasses and a colourful tie.  The features were unabashedly accurate, from the size of the forehead to the haunted hairline.  From this angle, I could see why the taxi driver was so amused.

In addition to the generosity of time and effort, I was touched by the number of people who came to the party bearing gifts. I had received an Andy Warhol picture depicting the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, a snappy tie and socks combo that nearly matched, a gorgeous green and gold silk pocket square, a personally engraved notebook, and enough Jack Daniel’s and Jameson to last me until my 50th birthday. It was almost too much, and then it did become overwhelming when the Plant Doctor made his presentation. From the outside it looked like any other gift-wrapped offering, even if it was difficult to believe that he could wrap so neatly. Inside, however, it was anything but an ordinary gift. I was stunned to find a collection of six books bringing to life all of the blog stories I had published online between 2018 and 2023. Across 1, 114 pages, the books weaved together every fabric of our friendship, with contributions in each volume from those closest to me and others who have featured in my writing through the years. I have long dreamed of seeing my words in print but tempered that ambition with my own self-doubt about who really wants to read of interactions where women are being asked if it’s a good idea to go rafting in the rain.

It would be easy to think from the likeness of the Piñata that my head could hardly get any bigger, but holding this impressive tome in my hands challenged that notion.  At least, it was that way until I witnessed the vigour that my niece showed in battering the Piñata.  There was a relentless cacophony of plastic on paper mache, yet my big bald forehead wouldn’t budge.  Eventually the bat slipped out of my niece’s hand, landing at the feet of the VAT man.  He reached down to pick it up and found himself overcome with the temptation that just about anybody else would.  A gunshot-like sound reverberated around the place and the room was filled with silence as bags of Haribo fell from the gaping wound in my head.  As my paper likeness crumpled to the floor, the VAT man’s face was a picture of remorse – at least for a handful of seconds, until the sweets were gleefully gathered up and the burst Piñata was placed over my head.  Think Frank Sidebottom, but reeking of Joop! and Jameson.  When you consider that split-second decision to pick up the dropped bat and all that followed, maybe Benjamin Franklin didn’t have it all figured out after all.