A few days after my 40th birthday, and I’m in my jammies, watching a programme about brain surgery. I’m both fascinated and appalled, and hoping against hope that no child comes barrelling in to ask me a million questions until it’s over.
I’ve long suspected I would have made an excellent neurosurgeon, despite there being no evidence to support my theory. For a woman who has, variously over the years, gone to work and left the front door wide open, swung round a bend in the road to hear her door keys fly off the car roof and irretrievably into a field of wheat, and left her passport on a train – twice – this is ambitious, to say the least. Neurosurgery, and curling; I’ve often felt I would make an Olympic-grade curler, if only I ever got round to giving it a shot.
Anyway, the neurosurgery taking place was of the ‘awake’ variety. The surgeon removes a section of the skull, then the patient gets woken up and asked a series of questions while the surgeon presses tools into the brain surface, mapping the different areas that control speech. I imagine it would feel like testing the density of jelly with the back of a spoon when you’re a kid; satisfyingly tensile, but you know that once you break into the surface you’ve ruined its perfection forever. And while being awake while someone presses metal objects into your dense and shining brain, which holds all of the stuff that make you, you, is obviously shite for the patient, my first thought was genuinely – what an experience.
I’ve worried about turning 40 a bit, in a way that I don’t usually worry about stuff. In fact, that’s often been my ‘thing’, if I could ever claim to be interesting enough to have a thing – hey, check me, I’m too cool for, like, having concerns and stuff. But it’s also just true. I don’t lie awake at 3am wondering about the big things or the small, and I believe that life mostly works out. I’m impatient with obsessive poring over of problems, and I don’t know why people can’t just, for the love of fuck, stop going on about it and wait to see what happens. It’s almost never as bad as you think, and it’s frequently much, much more interesting than you gave your imagination credit for.
But here’s what I’m learning about turning 40. I just want to be around. I want to grimace as I hear my car keys sliding off into a field, and recognise the metal-on-metal sound for what it is. I want to still close my eyes as I drive through tight spaces (I’m not saying I recommend it, I’m just saying it’s how I do it). I want to lie in bed with a six year old who doesn’t get knock knock jokes, but will laugh hysterically anyway. I want to go back in time and be 19 again for just one day – and one would be enough, given how much of that year I spent hungover and lovelorn. I am just beginning to see, in the defiant curve of my daughter’s jaw who she’ll become, and I want to arrive in the future having got it right. I want my toes in the very edge of the Mediterranean. 
I want friends, and laughing, and sips of beer so cold it gives me the hiccups. I want to never get bored of playing songs as loud as they will go, because there’s no other way to mash and mesh them into my heart and brain and bones. I want to write a book with a title as rhythmically perfect to my ear as ‘At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’. I want that book to feel like Yes, by Mcalmont and Butler, and taste like the ashes of the Marlboro reds I haven’t smoked since 1998.
I want all of the experiences that life has got to offer. That bit in Pink Glove when Jarvis Cocker’s voice goes all gruff when I remember dawn coming up, and me wrapped in unfamiliar sheets. The first day of the year when it’s warm enough to go barefoot in the garden and I feel the grass tickle between my toes. The tonsillitis, the sinusitis, and the achy broken toe that I can’t remember actually breaking – I’ll take them. The cups of coffee in the silent morning, the first painfully tart spoonful of Greek yoghurt, the bitter taste of unrequited loyalty when a piece of work doesn’t land like you thought it might. Sitting on a bench overlooking Robin Hood’s Bay and feeling more loved than I ever hoped for.
I want it all. The good, the bad, the hopeful, the nostalgic, the terrifying, the over-ambitious, the smile on my face whenever I hear Laid by James, the boredom, the petty, the arguments, the wrongs and the rights, the problems and puzzles, the solutions, the sacrifices. Books with pages that smell like stories. The cat coming home just because he wants to sit on my knee. Bring it on. Bring it all on. I don’t think I crammed enough into the first 40 years, but I didn’t know then what I know now. That tiny moments and big moments, big ones and massive ones, the ones that make you laugh, or cry, or wish you still smoked, those are actually everything. They’re all we get. You never get to a place and think ‘phew, I did it’. I feel like a fisherman, reeling my moments in, arm over arm, in a net that’s fit to burst. And yet, it isn’t full enough. Not even close.
Foxy Revenger Strives for More 