Not growing old: the Dorian Gray convention

I went to the Indie 21st anniversary bash last night; it was held in the upstairs room of the Angel, a sleazepit almost unchanged in twenty years. Even the man behind the bar was the same Irishman.

I had expected this to be an occasion for Anthony Powell-ish meditations on the ravages wrought by time and chance; dead on cue, the first person I met started talking about Wyn Harness, a sub who died of brain cancer last week. But as the evening wore on it became obvious that the really strange thing was how little anyone had changed, as if being a journalists stabilised and strenghtened certain aspects of character. We all had the psychological equivalent of blacksmiths’ arms.

Physically, quite a lot of the women looked better now, approaching fifty, than they had done as stressed, hard-drinking thirty-year-olds. You’d expect this of alpha females like Sarah Helm, but there were others, too, who were quite shockingly good looking. You would not say that, really, of the men.

The office lothario (a title hotly contested, I agree, but the only one not such a shit as to be blacklisted from the reunion) was still grinning his vague, charming grin, and saying how much he hoped he would not fail to recognise anyone he had slept with. Then he went off to the fortieth birthday party of a former intern, whom he had of course fucked back when the world was young. Comments on his performance found their way onto the office gossip file, along with his modest disclaimers.

The newspaper’s designated wholesale merchant of bullshit was standing, exactly as he had always done, making some of the same remarks, though thinner now, and possibly thicker haired. The IT guy who gave my first unix account had turned up; all the photographers, who seemed, on balance a bit sleeker and less crazy, perhaps because they are. I recognised about half the people I talked to. It hardly mattered, since conversation rapidly became impossible.

There was no audible music, just people talking, but within an hour the noise grew to an undifferentiated roar of friendliness, about as loud as the last rock concert I attended, Bob Dylan at Wembley Arena. Under the circumstances it was impossible to do more than grip people’s arms sincerely and grin. Oh, one more thing. In four hours I drank three pints of beer and a pint of tonic water. That wouldn’t have happened when the paper started.