Age of discontent

From The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis:

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!... Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past. 

I’m closer to fifty than I am to thirty-five, so I think I know what old Mart’s talking about. But then I’ve felt that way since I was about eight or nine.

(Flood update: the worst is behind us. Although that depends on which way we’re facing.)