Walking the nine circles

Nothing makes you feel older than walking through wonderful filthy clubland on Friday night.

I pondered if this was the antidote I needed to that creeping sense of something I could't quite put my finger on: thinking about ageing out of view, perhaps – and is ageing always anti-urban, rural and semi-rural or faux-rural? No, just past the inner ring of clubland you reach the first ring of gilded restaurants and gold-lit bars where the early-middle-aged sit in clean blouses and shirts, discussing golf and hotel visits and last month's sales figures.

I continued half-thinking of my sense of worthlessness in clubland, my irrelevance, my disregard. I thought a bit about self-pity – that glue of late middle age. Or was it anxiety about anxiety itself, worrying about worrying about ageing. Who knows or cares? Honestly, here in clubland, the screams persist and you want to be in them. Except in clubland I was of course the outsider, the ghost among the ghosts of youth. Lying in doorways, the other ghosts had other ideas. It was the great, no the grandiose joy of waste. The beauty of the waste-mission.

Anyway, as I wandered through the rocking crowds, heading back into the calmer darkness of the city centre, I was totally surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of children. It was disconcerting – what were all these children in clubwear doing? Some were sitting by walls, some were screaming and laughing, gossiping and throwing their heads back. Lines of blue-lit fast-food shops were choked with the glamorous and giddy. It all felt far away. And then I realised that they were't children at all, and this the whole ecstatic enterprise of drinking and dancing and desire was the world of young adults. Or nearly adults. Or possibly the end of something not quite adult. This is the very point of it. The furious sexy boundary.

I remembered Manchester in the 1980s. I remembered trying to talk in the chaotic flashing dark of subterranean clubs, the spilled drinks, the sticky vinyl seating, the swimming floors, feeling utterly confused that nothing could be heard above thumping chest-wrenching electronica. It seemed a lifetime ago. I remembered friends pressing their mouths into my ears that I might hear their shouts for more ... more drink, more dancing, just more. More and more.

In the end that short journey through the manic joy, and manic joylessness, of self-dissolution showed me something less morbidly reflective: that life wastes well.

It wastes through youth, and wastes through early adulthood, it wastes through mid-life: those bleary decades of parenting, juggling the narcissism and deflections and inevitable collapse of a career, until you come through. You come through. Something you built around you lies suddenly silent and vacant. Crowds of the deliriously beautiful, the panicked screaming laughter at the speed of their waste-mission, it's all gone. Almost everything is gone – thank heavens – except the mirror of your purpose. And in sooty blue-light in a deep room just before dawn, you glimpse your reflection, maybe, the person that survived into her/his own gorgeous absence – who has wakened to find what it was you were running to, or running from, who has ended up here. As we all end up somewhere. Purified, if we are lucky.