Here's what I've learned as my 70th birthday and the spectre of death loom

Call me foolish, deluded even, but I can’t quite match the date on my birth certificate with my everyday reality. As I shrug on my on-trend (fake) brown suede jacket, slip into my old-school Adidas and pop in my AirPods, I feel little different to the 16-year-old girl I once was, resplendent in a red satin jacket and platform clogs. Even the soundtrack remains the same. David Bowie is as fresh and exciting as he was in 1972.

But of course, everything is different. I am nearly twice the weight I was as a skinny teenager, when I considered a single Number 6 cigarette and a pack of KP peanuts a nutritious diet.

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‘I’m in heaven’

I have scars that tell of my life as an adult human female – a purple slash across my belly where my second son was pulled from my body on the verge of death and varicose veins that emerged during my first (teenage) pregnancy. “They will go once the baby arrives?” I asked the doctor. He laughed. “No, they are here for life, just like the baby.” And David Bowie? Well, he died ten years ago, the same age that I am now.

I think of his dying often, not least his determination to turn a death sentence into a wondrous thing. “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” he sang on Lazarus, from his final album Blackstar released on his birthday, two days before he died on January 10, 2016. I envy his equanimity in the face of his mortality. All I have is fear as I consider my own end, and in the year of my ‘big’ birthday, dying is often on my mind.

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It's hard not to think about the approach of death when you have lived your biblically allotted span. Each major life decision, where to go on holiday, how to spend what’s left of dwindling savings, is met with the internal question, “will I still be alive next year?”

Friends you once considered immortal, die – some suddenly, others from long-drawn illnesses. Worse, dementia, the scourge that robs people of their very humanity, is becoming as common as Covid among my peers.

Death is always on my mind, which leaves me with a choice: succumb to the dark thoughts and spend the rest of my life immersed in doom, listening to Leonard Cohen and drinking absinthe until the inevitable happens. Or put on my red shoes and dance.

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The Northern Lights

So, without a thought to the impact on those dwindling savings, this month I am going to eat fresh sardines in Portugal, outside in the winter sunshine. In February, I am taking my husband to the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights.

Freezing temperatures and long, long winter nights are my idea of hell, but he has longed to experience the Aurora Borealis, so in an act of selflessness, as I keep reminding him, I ordered a pair of snow boots and booked a cheap flight to Tromso.

In March, I am heading down to south-west France to spend time with one of my dearest friends who is standing in her local council elections. Armed with nothing more than her Irish passport, she moved to France in the early months of the pandemic and has built a fabulous life full of dogs, new friends and of course, decent red wine and cheese. And now – fingers crossed – she is going to be a conseillère municipale and I want to be at the count to crack open the Cremant.

Then in April, we head to the land of hope and dreams, the United States of America, for a three-week road trip taking in North and South Carolina, Georgia and the northern tip of Florida. Our last foray was in 2018 when we spent six months driving from the east to the west coast and back again and we couldn’t countenance never visiting again. So Trump or no Trump, in three months’ time we’re riding out to case the once-promised land.

One of the world’s great wonders

And with a final flourish of my credit card, I have booked my birthday celebrations in August. There will be no party, no cake, no presents. Instead I will rise early on the morning of the big day and climb to the top of the Acropolis in Athens, where once again, and perhaps for the final time, I will survey one of the greatest wonders of the world: the Parthenon.

It is hard to describe what the sight of its classical form, towering over the municipal clutter of Athens means to me. Order over chaos. The power of human endeavour. Immortality.

Whatever, it is where I want to be on the morning of August 25, and by lunchtime I will be in my favourite rooftop restaurant overlooking the temple, drinking retsina (the good stuff), grateful that I have been lucky enough to live a full, if at times painful, life.

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Seven months ago, when my mother died, suddenly but in her late 80s, we found a card she had left for us. “I have no debts,” she had written proudly in her still strong, cursive script. Instead she left us a few thousand pounds each, money she had carefully squirreled away, week after week, eked out of her pension.

I could, some may argue should have, paid off my credit card with my modest legacy. Instead I have invested it in road trips, long lunches in the sunshine and friendship. The spectre of death may be my constant companion, but life is for living, even if my knees creak and my back aches. Happy New Year.