Yacht Rock and dead parent life expectancy maths

yacht rock, a photo by Auswomble on Flickr.

I've never really thought of myself as young, middle aged or old. In fact I rarely give any thought to my age. Yes, my eyesight is not as good as it was and I think cuts and scrapes are taking longer to heal, but I feel as fit now as I did 20 years ago. Mind you, 20 years ago I was probabaly drunk or hungover, which may have smoothed the grotty feeling of inevitable physical decline. But today I had a brief, overwhelming feeling of middleagedness. As I made my way to the changing room, after my run to work, I realised I was carrying a pink shirt and chinos.

I can explain; I was wearing the same chinos when I worked at PA Consulting. They are at least 15yrs old, fairly ratty and I dug them out to wear at work because I was close to wearing through the arse of the brown cords I've been wearing for the last couple of years. The pink shirt is not pink but has narrow red stripes. So yes, it looks pink. I paid about $10 for it. It was bought from the auction site Graysonline in a sale of stock from a shop that had gone bust. So my clothes are cheap and cheerless, just what I need for sitting on my backside all day tapping away at a keyboard. But they are chinos and a pink shirt. So I am dressed middle aged. Specifically yacht-rock middle aged, sans boat shoes (for the record I am not wearing any shoes.)

But being middle aged is, for me, not such a bad thing. Based upon my "dead parent life expectancy maths" I am already old and have been for some time. Allow me to elucidate. Both of my parents are dead and neither were murdered, committed suicide or died in a freak accident. That means I can combine their age-at-death, divide by two to get their average lifespan and then divide by three to split my own life into "young", "middle age" and "old." With a little bit of rounding...

((46 + 73)/2)/3 = 19.8

So I became middle aged in November 1989, a little before my 20th birthday. Now I think about it...I may have had a pair of Timberland boat shoes, but I most definitely did not own a pink shirt. I've been old since the end of September 1999. However, with the exception of sports shorts I have not started wearing elastic-waist trousers. The maths says I'll be dead in 16years, before my 60th birthday and 8.7years under the life expectancy for a British man born in 1970.

That's quite a sobering thought so I'm glad it's mostly bollocks. And now for some smooth sounds.