First came the interview with Saga magazine, then an anxious call with my daughter. Could these be the signs of age creeping up on me?
There is a moment in the second season of the Netflix series Narcos when the baddest baddie of them all, Pablo Escobar, is reduced to burning dollar bills to keep warm. Boyd Holbrook, playing the DEA agent Steve Murphy, says: “I read in a book somewhere about a rich guy who goes broke. When he’s asked how it happened, how he had lost everything, he answered: ‘Slowly at first. And then … all at once.’”
Ageing is a bit like that. You lose your vigour slowly at first, and then all at once. At 55 – it still shocks me when I write that number down – I am not yet at what I might term the money-burning phase of my decline, but three unsettling indicators of the downward slope of life have come my way in the past week. They are not serious in and of themselves, but together they’re nagging away at me like nobody’s business.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
