What nobody tells you about growing older ...

Both William Blake and U2 remind me that there should be more to midlife than Panadol and sensible shoes, Deborah Williams writes

When I saw the Rolling Stones play in Abu Dhabi, I was amazed that men old enough to be my father had the stamina necessary for a rock show, says Deborah Williams. Jeff Haynes / Reuters

It starts small: a twinge here and there, maybe an ache in the lower back the day after a game of golf or a bike ride. And then one morning you notice that you no longer bound out of bed but get yourself vertical in segments. And then before you know it, you find that the phrase: “I’ve got this hip thing” (or shoulder, knee, back thing) recurs more and more frequently. Welcome to the ageing process, whereby those things we want up (skin, jowls, abs) go down and the things we want down (blood pressure, weight, cholesterol) go up.

I’ve been thinking about ageing this summer, as I visit family and friends, including a weekend with friends from college, which means they are old friends in all senses of that phrase. In our minds, we may feel like spring chickens of 30, but our conversations tell a different story. We talk about parents with serious health problems, about children leaving for college. We keep Panadol easily to hand and we all wear shoes that try to be stylish but are really just sensible. And in the course of our visiting, we returned again and again to midlife questions about what the next chapters of our lives will hold.

This nip of middle-aged mortality may explain why I was ambivalent when, a few weeks ago, my husband got the two of us tickets to see that quartet of middle-aged Irishmen known as U2, led by professional do-gooder Bono, who was once a Dublin punk rocker and is now a Davos insider. Aren’t we a little old for all that, I thought; why spend the money and why this band, which isn’t as ancient as the Rolling Stones but is (slightly) older than we are and rich enough that their onstage paeans to rebellion seem ironic at best, parodic at worst. But the tickets had already been bought, so I put on my sensible shoes and off we went – and let me say, before the diehard fans come after me, that it was a great concert.

U2’s latest album is called Songs of Innocence, a title borrowed from William Blake, whose radical ideas frequently got him into trouble and whose genius was not fully recognised until well after his death in 1827. U2 seem pretty convinced about their own genius and although I’m sure that music critics no longer consider U2 to be “relevant”, I do know that the band made the 20,000 seat arena seem almost intimate.

As we left for the concert, my younger son told us that rock-and-roll is “music for old people”, and indeed, there were more than a few bald heads in the audience. The songs from this album seem of a piece with my own middle-aged musings about family, growing up and what the second half of a life can hold. U2’s music is embedded in my memories of growing up, from those days when people “bought albums” instead of downloaded songs and when a concert ticket set you back $30 (Dh110) instead of $200. That’s what my generation has instead of Proustian madeleines: snippets of rock lyrics that send us spinning back to our youth.

When I saw the Rolling Stones play in Abu Dhabi, I was amazed that men old enough to be my father had the stamina necessary for a rock show. Clearly, U2 must be working out with the same personal trainers.

Bono showed no signs of the intensive surgeries he had after his recent cycling accident – he never stopped moving. His scrupulously choreographed enthusiasm was infectious: the audience stayed on its feet the entire time, clapping and singing. Perhaps U2 has taken not only a title from William Blake but also inspiration: even on his deathbed (at the ripe old age of 69), Blake continued to write and draw and paint. I don’t know how Bono recovers between shows but both Blake and U2 remind me that there should be more to midlife than Panadol and sensible shoes. There will be inevitable aches and pains – my feet were killing me after two hours of concert-induced standing – but there needs to be singing and dancing and loud music, too.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi