THERE ARE TIMES when I am convinced I am sliding down the razor blade of life. A few days ago, just after my 65th birthday, I was visiting the local library when the lady at the desk looked up at me somewhat startled and remarked, "Actually, you don't LOOK 83."

Part of the reason I had dropped by was to pick up some information on hobbies I could tackle to while away the time before packing up for the marble orchard, but she solved that dilemma quickly enough. I thought I might go out straightway, buy the necessary equipment and a copy of the rules and take up Russian roulette.

But first, I had to get a bus pass, which was the other reason I was at the library. (This is Britain, where you can't buy a Bible on Sunday but you can buy Playboy, public schools are private and vice versa, and visiting a friend at 5 in the afternoon is legal, so getting a travel card at the library makes perfectly good sense.)

In London, there are certain advantages that accrue to turning 65, one of which is you get free public bus and rail transportation until your current travel card expires, or you do, whichever comes first. So here I was, at the library, to collect my card - or my "Freedom Pass," as it's called.

I stepped up to the "Freedom Pass" desk with my application, two photos, a copy of my birth certificate from South Carolina, my television license (in this country, we pay something over 160 bucks a year to view people barfing in hospital dramas), letter from the Inland Revenue (our tax pirates), telephone bill (it took a wheelbarrow to get that one up the three flights of stairs) and passport - all to prove I was the decrepit old fool who was the legitimate resident in a flat (apartment) not worth half of what they charge me.

The lady at the desk shuffled my documents with a stack of others, raked through the debris, peered down at one bit of paper, then up at me, puzzled: "Actually you don't LOOK 83."

My day was now going very pear-shaped as I sought a suitable reply. Where was Winston Churchill when I needed him? (Winnie was a master of the sharp rejoinder. When Lady Nancy Astor remarked that "Sir, if I were your wife, I'd serve you poison," he replied, "Madam, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.")

Suddenly the pass lady smiled. "I'm sorry," she said, "I picked up the wrong application. This one is for that man who's just going out the door." More smiles in my direction. "I thought how well you looked for your age, and I was about to ask what you were taking."

What I was contemplating taking just then was a double dose of cyanide chased down by an exceedingly large scotch. I glanced at my "lookalike" - scrawny, bottle-bottom glasses, bald, shuffling along with a cane. He didn't look 83. He looked 183.

I thought about sharing the cyanide with the pass woman. "Actually, I'm only 65," I said. She looked dubious. I seized my new "Passenger Pass," stuffed it in my wallet upside down, and fled.

Safely away from the library, I pondered my new position in life. I would no longer have to pay to stand like a perpendicular sardine on a train for 45 minutes with my nose stuffed in someone's armpit, or battle claustrophobia while no one bothers to tell me why the train has decided to take up permanent residence in a dark tunnel a mile or three under London, or be entertained by tone-deaf Romanian gypsies squeezing dirges to Count Dracula from a badly distressed accordion.

All these privileges I now get for free. O Frabjous Joy!

Meanwhile, my wife Elizabeth claims I am 65 going on 12 and stranded in Ga-Ga Land somewhere between Eccentric and Downright Potty. Some of this, I judge from her remarks, stems from my preference for fried Spam sandwiches and grits mixed with canned salmon for lunch.

Also, I have a rather beaten-up old white hat that I enjoy wearing to England cricket matches. Elizabeth says it looks like something that has been used to wipe horses' butts and insists that I walk six feet behind her if I wear it when we go out together.

Nor, says she, do I have any dress nous, and in fact when it comes to the art of being nattily attired I resemble less a clotheshorse than a ragamuffin camel. As for color coordination, whatever that may be, she resorts to "diabolical" and "dread-awful" and other hurtful descriptives.

Well, now I am 65 years old, and not only do I have my "Freedom Pass" to travel to Crouch End and the Isle of Dogs, but also my freedom to be more or less who - or maybe what - I want to be. Even a tad eccentric, if that's what battered old hats and Spam sandwiches and using the holes in track suits as ballpoint pen holders are.

Besides which, Elizabeth says she'll stick around for a few years more, even if my occasionally unruly hair does make me look, as she insists despairingly, "like a mad professor with the dress sense of an aardvark."

Okay, so much for that. Now back to the hobbies - and where's that book on the Viking Age Club's Nordic Society and Culture card weaving. . .

Thought for the Week: Where there's a will, try to be in it.

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