I was in London a few days ago, at a meeting with people of my age and older. We all knew each other, essentially, as we were all at the same school, though I wasn’t there as one of the Committee. I had been invited to explain a report I’d been commissioned to write, which is the sort of phrase that makes a morning sound much more purposeful than it often feels while waiting for the coffee to improve.
To be fair, it progressed better than most meetings. Many of those present had spent years in full employment attending meetings, chairing meetings, surviving meetings and watching meetings turn feral if allowed to roam free. They knew perfectly well how quickly a simple item can become a swamp, and how a discussion intended to last ten minutes can stretch itself beyond reason while everyone pretends this is still a productive use of life.
It was a familiar sort of gathering: decent people, old experience, a proper agenda, and the faint sense that everyone had once been rather busier than this. There were the usual signs of age, of course. Slightly cautious knees. Spectacles being moved about with increasing urgency. People leaning forward not because they were especially interested, but because modern speech has somehow been designed for people with the hearing range of a bat.
But the real giveaway was above the eyes: eyebrows.
At a certain age, the body seems to abandon any sensible allocation of hair. It removes it from places where it was once useful, then reassigns it to ears, nostrils and eyebrows, as if managed by a tiny department of vindictive clerks. Young eyebrows lie down obediently. They know their place. Older eyebrows develop opinions. Left alone, they begin to look as though you have a couple of small ferrets pasted above your eyes.
They thicken, stiffen and turn sideways. A single grey hair, once trimmed, doesn’t disappear. It becomes more obvious, sticking out horizontally with a blunt end, like a tiny bit of fencing wire. You can see the tell-tale signs of intervention. Someone has had a go at them, but not entirely won.
I should say at this point that I do trim my own eyebrows. No. 3 on the trimmer. This sounds controlled and purposeful, but it’s really just hedging. No. 2 feels reckless, No. 4 feels like appeasement, and doing nothing would allow the outer edges to start communicating with passing aircraft. So No. 3 it is: the middle way between grooming and topiary.
No one mentions any of this, naturally. We are civilised men. We discuss the subject in hand - whether a clarification to a rule makes it a new rule - while politely ignoring the fact that half the room has small grey aerials above its spectacles. This, I suppose, is one of the remaining purposes of civilisation: allowing men to debate constitutional nuance while pretending not to notice that several participants appear to be receiving weather reports through their eyebrow antennae.
Then there were the hands. Because we mostly knew each other, the hands were not revealing entire hidden lives. They were doing something subtler. They were confirming the post-retirement biographies in a way words never quite do.
Some were smooth, clean and unmarked, with nails so immaculate they looked as though they had spent their later years signing things, turning pages, holding a glass properly and occasionally moving a paperclip from one side of the desk to the other. Useful work, no doubt. Necessary work, even. The world would probably stop without forms, authorisations and men who can look at a report and say, “I think we need a further report.” But those hands had not been in much direct combat with reality lately.
Other hands were different. Gnarled, scarred, creased, with the permanent memory of tools. Hands with old cuts from rust, solder, paint, a GT6, a couple of ride-on mowers, and the general bloody-mindedness of objects. Hands with traces of oil or primer still under the nails, not because the owner was careless, but because some substances enter a man’s life and take up residence.
Those hands had not just pointed at problems. They had had to persuade them, usually with a spanner, heat, paint, bad language, or all four. Faces can be arranged. Jackets can be chosen. Shoes can be polished. Hands are harder to edit.
By a certain age, hands become a sort of logbook. Not complete, not always flattering, but usually honest. They record what sort of life you have had contact with since the official one ended. Paper leaves one sort of mark. Machinery leaves another. A stubborn bracket under a GT6 leaves a mark that is both physical and spiritual, usually accompanied by the loss of a small washer into a place Triumph never intended a human hand to reach.
And then there is retirement, which reveals another fork in the road. Some people devote themselves to cruises. This is fair enough, provided one has developed a taste for being processed politely through carpeted corridors with 3,000 other people also pretending this is adventure.
I have nothing against ships. Quite the reverse. But there is a difference between going to sea and being stacked on a floating hotel with a buffet, a theatre, and a daily programme telling you when to be delighted. A European river cruise, possibly. That at least has banks, towns, bridges and the faint hope that one may get off without being summoned by public address to Deck Seven for line dancing.
But a large cruise ship? No. I have spent enough of my life around vessels to know that being aboard one doesn’t automatically make the experience nautical. Sometimes it just means you are trapped in a shopping centre that has lost sight of land. I’d rather take a quick plane flight between destinations and use the saved days for something more useful, like losing a washer under the GT6.
So there we were, in London, discussing whether a clarification to a rule is still merely a clarification, or has quietly become a new rule, while the real biographies sat on the table and bristled above the eyes.
The eyebrows said: time has been at work here.
The hands said: yes, but so have I.
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