Inner conflict
Jeremy Clarke During the last week of my stay in the Alpujarras, the almond trees flowered. It happened almost overnight. There was an exceptionally warm afternoon and evening, and next morning the trees were foaming with pink and white petals, and very pretty it was, too.
The day they flowered was my birthday. To mark it, I went for a long walk in the countryside. I didn't enjoy it. The almond blossom's perfect newness made me jealous. At 50, it seemed to me, I had more in common with the stones under my feet than with the flowers. Fifty! Even the word seemed distasteful. To have lived for half a century somehow seemed wrong. Today, life expectancy in the world's poorer countries is about 45. If it wasn't for global capitalism being heavily weighted in my favour, I reasoned, and the expensive skills of my dentist, I should be brown bread by now.
And of what use to anyone, really, is a man of 50? Apart from being available to march out and fling himself on the foe in wartime, not much, I'd say. I used to think an opportunity to make this kind of belated sacrifice was coming to my generation. Not since the Conquest, surely, has a political elite treated the English nation with such contempt. We won't stand for this much longer, I used to think. Somebody's going to start shooting in a minute — a saintly Yorkshireman, probably — and we'll all be going at it hammer and tongs.
But we have stood for it. And my childhood belief that I belonged to a moral community that also happened to be a famous nation, and that one day I might be required to die for it, has almost overnight become not merely redundant, but also pernicious. How should I cope with that at 50? Should I now make a lone, despairing, violent gesture of my own to salute the memory of my grandfather's four brothers buried in France? But whom should I fling myself on? Blair? Brown? Sir Menzies?
Such, I'm afraid, were my thoughts on the parched hillside under the almond blossom on my birthday. I returned to the house discouraged. In the afternoon I kept an appointment for a cup of tea with Julia, my English-speaking neighbour. I'd let slip about it being my birthday, but warned her that a cup of weak tea was about as far as I was prepared to go to mark such a demoralising occasion. She compromised by presenting me with, and interpreting for me, my astrological birth chart. The last birth chart she drew up, nearly six years ago, so clearly indicated personal tragedy in her subject's life that Julia was shaken up and abandoned the practice. But my personality had intrigued her enough to dust off the old astrological computer software and make a comeback.
She laid the print-out of symbols and intersecting lines within concentric circles between us on the coffee table and looked at it. 'There's conflict here,' she said. And here. And here. Tremendous conflict. Going on all the time. Within yourself.' She showed me on the chart how my positive planetary aspects were opposed by negative ones. That was what all those lines crossing the innermost circle were: points of conflict. Everything in my chart seemed to be opposed by something else. It was the chart, summarised Julia, of a person prone to mental breakdown. But, if I hadn't had one by now, I'd probably have learnt how to hold the ring — so that was encouraging.
Other planetary aspects suggested to Julia that I am a pathological loner with a humanitarian streak who likes to gather information. A sort of cross, then, between Albert Schweitzer and Alan Whicker. Then she looked puzzled. She took up the chart and scrutinised a particular aspect. Could she see something about my old age? I wondered. A wheelchair on its side, perhaps, and me on top of Yasmin AlibhaiBrown, trying to throttle her with my bare hands? But it was only more conflicting planetary aspects that she'd noticed: an obscure but apparently telling one between my parents' birth signs; and yet another between theirs and my own. To cheer me up, Julia told me that inner conflict was sometimes a good thing because it generates energy. But there was absolutely no getting away from it. What we were looking at that afternoon was the astrological birth chart of a neurotic mediocrity — a 50-year-old neurotic mediocrity.
Later, as soon as I got back to the house, I studied my face in the mirror. I couldn't make up my mind about it one way or the other. Then I shaved it, rearranged the barnet a bit, and went out to a bar and fired a few lagers down my throat without in any way contravening my resolution not to celebrate my birthday.
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