The big Hawaii

It's the age at which your joints are suddenly supposed to ache, and the delights of Saga magazine become apparent. But does it have to be that way? As Tony Blair prepares for his 50th birthday next month, John Walsh (49, and counting) wonders how to make sense of the half century

Tony Blair is 50 next month. The news will shock those who assumed that their PM was stuck forever at a youthful, perma-grinning 43, or those who, looking at his ravaged features in the last two weeks, wondered when he started to resemble a stern kirk elder in his mid-seventies. But on 6 May he will have to pause in his transglobal endeavours to ask himself the same question asked by a few thousand British fellow citizens, namely: "Bugger me, how on earth did I get to be fifty?".

He can console himself that his birthday – 6 May 1953 – fell in interesting times. Stalin had died two months earlier. Eisenhower had become US President in January. Queen Elizabeth II was just weeks away from ascending the throne of England. A bald, clownish man called Nikita Khrushchev would soon become First Secretary of the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Party. Something called the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe had recently met for the first time in Strasbourg to thrash out a draft constitution for a proposed "European Political Community". Benjamin Britten had composed Gloriana for the coronation (watched by millions through the new miracle of television), England were about to win the Ashes, the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was soon to be published, and the Deborah Kerr-Burt Lancaster love scene in From Here to Eternity was packing 'em in at the cinema. Miles away in Nepal, Sir John Hunt's mountaineering expedition was about to conquer the highest peak in the world.

Like baby Blair, much of the modern world was born in 1953, in all its new-Elizabethan, Eurocentric, Cold War-haunted, spy-loving, TV-worshipping, sexually liberated, triumphalist glory. It will be easy for Blair to congratulate himself on his timing and think that the world got started at about the same time that he did (although it's a common solipsistic fallacy of the middle-aged that their history and the world's are seriously intertwined).

Blair is also lucky in his generation; he can count himself in some very cool company. Leaving aside his parliamentary confrères, Stephen Byers and Michael Portillo, the class of '53 can boast Pierce Brosnan, John Malkovich, Graham Gooch and Griff Rhys Jones. It must put a spring in the step of an old rock'n'roller like the PM to find himself sharing the sear-and-yellow-leaf stage with Mike (Tubular Bells) Oldfield, Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners and Alex Van Halen, the heavy-metal drummer, not to mention the veteran rock chicks Bonnie Tyler and Cyndi Lauper.

Good company – but it doesn't put off the questions that come crowding in on the almost-50. How likely am I to die in the next 20 years? How much have I achieved? How healthy am I? Am I attractive to anyone any more? And lastly: why do I feel a strange mood-swing between elation at having survived life, fate and the job market for so long, and a terrible disgruntlement at having stuck it for all this time?

Because 50 has become a damned peculiar age. Once it was a kind of living death sentence. It meant that the part of your life that could be exciting or adventurous, from sex to mountaineering, was now effectively over, kaput, finished, no longer available in this style. The over-50s were the saddest demographic group of all, as they took their first, blinking steps into the arena of great age and decrepitude. Saga magazine and The Oldie both enlist their readership from an age bracket that begins with 50 and has no upper limit (except death). Marketing types eye the Blair generation as newcomers in a sector called "the grey pound" – people at the age when their children are leaving home, when their 25-year mortgage is finally paid off, and they are bursting at the seams with disposable income.

Being 50 is being pitched between your prime and your dotage, the moment when you teeter between the fifth and sixth of Shakespeare's seven ages of man, when the justice ("in fair round belly with good capon lined") is shifting, unconsciously, into the lean and slippered pantaloon. Like the decade that shares its name, one's personal fifties seem a grey, monochrome time, full of disappointments. "Love is lame at fifty years" wrote Hardy in "The Revisitation", and the spectre of flagging libido haunts the insecure. Discovering that you're 30 years beyond your sexual prime is not a happy place to be. "The view is fine from fifty/ Experienced climbers say", wrote a woeful Philip Larkin in 1972, before discovering that his previous 50 years are shrouded in a view-less fog, and concluding bleakly:

Where has it gone, the lifetime?

Search me. What's left is drear.

Unchilded and unwifed, I'm

Able to view that clear:

So final. And so near.

It isn't, thank goodness, like that any more. Since Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Pete ("Hope I die before I get old") Townshend went roaring past the half-ton milestone with no strain of credibility, there's been less stigma attached to 50 than ever before. The model Marie Helvin can announce her return to the photo-shoot – although the coverline to the accompanying article asked "Do You Think I'm Fifty?", as if amazed that anyone could admit to such antiquity. For Tony and Marie and Pierce and Ruby and Michael and the other 50-imminents, life is no longer dominated by thoughts of death and the dwindling of their powers, but with how organised their lives have become: their careers and relationships mobilised, their emotions equilibrated, their health properly assessed.

Like them, I'm going to hit 50 this year, and the air is full of strange noises and portents that life for my generation is about to change. The first sign is the low-level grumble of anxiety that you could have become so old. It's beyond credibility that we baby-boomers, whose youth in the Sixties and Seventies was so howlingly fixated on teenage culture, could be so incontrovertibly middle-aged. It is utterly shocking to discover that you're the same age as the prime minister (though when you discover that you're the same age as the Archbishop of Canterbury, that's when you shouldreally start to worry). The second sign is the campaign of stealthy mutiny your body wages against you – like deciding to make your eyes go funny when you're reading the A-Z of London or the instructions on a jar of Chicken Jalfrezi, a condition that's called presbyopia, or "old sight".

More alarming is the fact of redundancy among one's social acquaintance. In the last year, no fewer than six of my friends – all middle-class successful people pushing, or just past, 50 – have found themselves suddenly out of work. Tom is, or was, a fashion buyer, and is in tribunal dispute with the leading couture house that removed him from his desk one day last summer. Keith is a sales executive with a ritzy publishing house who, after six years of transatlantic flights and million-dollar revenues, was abruptly dropped one Friday, his desk occupied by a younger woman the following Monday.

Harry is an advertising copywriter (the most age-sensitive of professions) whose strategic shift into niche marketing didn't save him from the chop just before his 50th birthday: he now commutes to Brussels, where his experience is considered invaluable. Tim is a corporate lawyer, a specialist in takeover bids with an American firm, which coolly sent him his redundancy notice last New Year's Eve. Humphrey was a company director until a boardroom coup pitched him (at 51) into two years of the purgatory that men call "gardening leave".

And Paul was until lately a finance director at Kingfisher, the owners of Woolworths; he hopes to find another job before his 50th birthday in May, but accepts stoicially that there are age-related layoffs across the financial sector. "Because the clients they're dealing with are predominantly younger men, companies feel their advisers should be the same age, and that 50 is just too old. It means there are a lot of experienced older businessmen looking for jobs when there aren't enough jobs around. But I think, 'Sod it, I've got enough things to keep me interested.' At the moment, I'm reading everything I can get my hands on about the Sixties. And I've become a dab hand at washing and ironing..."

Perhaps my friends are just unlucky, and their circumstances no more than a coincidence. Or perhaps their experience is being replicated all over the nation, as lowing herds of prematurely retired ad-men and financial consultants meet in wine bars to advise and reassure each other that they will be able to afford a family holiday this summer. Smugly cocooned in journalism (the most age-non-sensitive of professions, as long as its practitioners can command a fair prose style and not fiddle their expenses), I notice dozens of acquaintances nearing 50 with the apprehension of weekend rowers heading into churning white waters with a vertiginous drop at the end.

The statistics justify their alarm. In the 1970s, 90 per cent of men in their fifties were working. By the year 2000, the figure had dropped to 75 per cent, and has been dropping like share prices during the three-year bear market. Fiftysomethings now constitute one-eighth of the UK population. In the next 20 years that figure will rise to one-fifth, while the proportion of fiftysomething men still in work slides steadily downwards. We're heading for a hitherto-unimaginable time when British men out of work in their fifties will outnumber those still working.

There is, however, an upside to this prognosis, one that's reflected in the genial equanimity of my workless compadres. It's the feeling that, at 50, their commitment to the work ethic has suffered a liberating blow. Sure, they would like to have the comfort and stability of steady employment in the media-industrial complex – but the shock of redundancy has mostly been supplanted by a wild surmise of alternatives. ("It's a curious feeling," reflected Paul the finance director, "that you've spent so many years climbing the ladder, and all the time it was leaning against the wrong wall.") Those whose children are leaving home and whose mortgages will be paid off in, say, five years have no trouble dreaming of a near future when they exist for leisure or travel or "personal growth" or the cultivation of artily crackpot ambitions other than herbaceous borders.

I was introduced to this syndrome by the late Roy Porter, the wayward professor of the history of medicine at the Wellcome Institute of London University, whom I interviewed in 2000 about his last great book, Enlightenment. He was then 53, and he said he was giving up academe for good, after 30 years and 80 books. I assumed he simply meant giving up teaching in order to write full-time. I was wrong. "There are so many things I want to do before I'm dead," he said poignantly, "so many things I've never done. I don't play any musical instrument. I don't speak anyone else's language properly. I've a desperate desire to go abroad and integrate with people who have different styles of life. I'd like to see if there's another side to me, more touchy-feely, sociable and integrative, someone who could do creative things." He said he fancied going to Brazil and learning to play the saxophone. Tragically, he was killed in a road accident before he could make it.

Our conversation was echoed two months later by my friend Rosie, an agent for children's writers, convalescing at 51 after beating off two life-threatening diseases. Was she keen to get back to work and normality? Was she hell. "What I really want," she said, "is to go to Australia to live and learn to paint in oils, something I've always fancied. I cannot go back to being a servant to other people for the rest of whatever time I've got." And she promptly did so, with the proceeds from the sale of a Harry Potter first edition.

Since then, I've heard the same passionate life-plan many times: the 50 watershed, the foreign country, the choice of beguilement. And it wasn't just a dream of nervy 49-year-olds. A senior colleague at The Independent confided on his 42nd birthday that he would stay in journalism until "the big Hawaii" (that is, Five-O), and then retire to France and write his memoirs. I have not the slightest doubt that he will do so. I have, after all, a successful paradigm of such behaviour in my life, in the figure of my English teacher, Joe Winter. He was the sort of teacher who changes lives through his passionate convictions and encouragement – I studied English at his Oxford college out of adulatory respect – and he lived his life at a slightly crazed pitch of poetic intensity.

He gave it all up at 50, retired from teaching, left his wife and children well cared for in Wimbledon, and moved alone to Calcutta, intending to return after a couple of years and then indulge his wanderlust elsewhere. He's been in India ever since, writing erudite articles on English authors for the Indian Statesman and translating the work of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali sage and Nobel laureate. "To move almost at random to another continent at 50 is a drastic way of satisfying one's curiosity about the world. In the event, one finds out something about oneself," he writes in the introduction to his new collection, Guest and Host (published by Anvil Press), which was launched the other day in a Holborn pub. It was astonishing to see him again. My old English master had become a bald and exotically bearded world traveller, genial, glittering-eyed, and clearly as happy in his new vocation as a pig in a Chowringhee market.

There's more than a trace, here, of the hippie dream that took a generation of druggy wanderers to Samarkand in the late 1960s. And the baby-boomer generation is still, I suspect, half in thrall to dreams of leaving, of remaking oneself in fresh clothes and new dwellings, once the habits of work and mortgage and family commitments have receded.

Fifty is now the watershed year for redundancy and panic about one's mortality, but also for a new self-empowerment among the rock'n'roll generation. Heaven knows whether such thoughts will occupy the mind of Tony Blair when he celebrates his half-century on 6 May. But if he should wonder whether the colossal strains of his current office might usefully be swapped, from now on, for a new life spent playing the guitar every evening in some lamplit bistro in the Camargue, he would, assuredly, not be alone.