A jokey exchange in Waitrose veers into darkly existential territory

A question about whether I was old enough to buy alcohol haunts me with brutal irony.

I was in Waitrose, buying, as is my habit, a bottle of wine. I was at the self-checkout machines. Don’t judge me. If you use these machines and buy alcohol, a person has to come over and confirm you are old enough. I have to admit that it is rare that I go into the supermarket and do not buy alcohol. (When I don’t buy alcohol, my shop is so cheap.) There is always a mildly anxious gap in time between when the red booze light starts flashing and when the assistant comes over to validate your age. Sometimes I think that the staff at Waitrose are playing a little game with me, seeing how long they can keep me waiting, reasoning I should learn that true pleasure lies in its deferral, in the anticipation. I am rarely in a hurry on these occasions, and use the time to contemplate the strange beauty of the world, or to pull faces into the camera above the checkout.

This time I caught the eye of a tall, young woman waiting around to do her bit for the thirsty writer. She looked like a younger version of my friend A—, who believes in astrology and tells me off for drinking ethanol (I am very fond of her). The young woman came over and said, quite deadpan: “I’m sorry, but I have to ask you: are you over 25?”

This kind of joke can backfire horribly. The person being asked can take great offence at having their leg pulled like this. (Oh, just in case you think the little portrait of me above this piece makes it look as though I might possibly look under 25, I can assure you that it is somewhat stylised, and that I look at least 59 of my 61 years.) But then they might have got the measure of me by now. I have, after all, been coming here almost every day for the last four years. It adds up. I, too, have the measure of many of the staff at the place. I can assure you that every single one of them is lovely. I wasn’t quite so familiar with this young woman, so it was slightly audacious of her to make that joke – which I appreciated. So I played along.

“Yes, I am,” I said, in the high, squeaky voice of an adolescent, and then modulated it to a fake-sounding basso profundo: “I mean, yes, I am.” Well, it wasn’t bad for the spur of the moment, I suppose. You try to do better. Still, it made my day, this brief comic interaction between two strangers. (I have the utmost respect for people who work in supermarkets. They know where everything is, which is incredible.) I like to think that this exchange could only have happened in Britain, but that’s probably not the case. A couple of days later, I saw the clip of Barack Obama making a very quick, very subtle and very funny gag about the size of Donald Trump’s knob. I am sure you know the one I mean: when he mentions Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” and then looks down at his hands, which he is holding about four inches apart. That was as deadpan as my Waitrose person: in fact, I’ve watched the clip a few dozen times now, and I cannot believe how he managed to deliver the line without corpsing. That takes talent of a rare order. Although I do now think that up until his delivery, he is in fact making a huge effort to suppress the giggles. There is a mounting hysteria, followed by stern self-discipline, in the delivery. Have another look and see what I mean.

The good vibes caused by Waitrose Person – and, indeed, Barack Obama’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention – didn’t last long. In fact, WP’s question about whether I was over 25 or not came back to haunt me with brutal irony. That is, the full force of my years began to weigh on me once more. I will spare you the details but, as a result of trying to make my hearing better, I have made it much worse, and am now deaf in one ear, and not much better in the other. This now happens more frequently than ever before and it is tiresome in the extreme. There is nothing like losing your hearing to make you feel old. It leaves you feeling unbalanced, doddery, perpetually querulous, as if all around you there are conversations happening that you can’t understand or join in with. All joy is drained from life, everything becomes a minor annoyance, one’s sense of humour disappears, and all one can do is curse the plugs of wax in the eartubes, and the tedious business of having to get rid of them.

If, as I do, you find both minor and major administration almost impossible, then going deaf makes them definitely so. At the moment, I have several debts to organise, a flat to tidy up, a book contract to sign, a divorce to arrange and indeed a solicitor to find, and all I can do is sit in bed and think about how overwhelming it all is. And the kicker is that as far as the problems of ageing go, this is utterly trivial, a soothing back rub before all the other nasties that are doubtless waiting for me further down the line arrive.

So I wonder what my response will be if anyone from Waitrose tries to crack a joke with me when I go there later today. I suppose I won’t even be able to hear it.