Old age is really starting to rear its ugly head. As I walk along on this moderately cold day with my left hand like a block of ice, and my lower back aching as usual, now my knee suddenly starts to hurt and I walk with a slight limp.
Not the limp!
I’m so proud of my graceful, upright walking style with my long, calculated steps, and my even longer legs, that I swear must take up two thirds of my body length. Losing that will come as a huge blow to me. So I vainly try to push through the pain.
But despite my age, I’m still turning heads. Men still “check me out” as they whizz past in their cars. If only they knew that beneath this façade I’m a biological male, a pile of creaking bones with non-stop farts at roughly regular intervals. At least one every hour, anyway!
I’m dreading the fabled “Involuntary Farts” that only happen to gross old people and pop out without needing any consent. When that day comes, my life is over. I might as well lock myself in a room and never come out again.
Sure, it will be inconvenient. And I’ll miss being able to chose my own cabbage at the supermarket. But there’s no way I’m going outside if I could unexpectedly “drop one” on an unsuspecting crowd. A sort of terrorist “gas” bomber. At least with actual terrorists you’ll never live to smell the pain.
But the race isn’t even over yet. And I’m not even sure it’s meant to be a race. Though it’s taken me forty-three years to at least start considering that life is meant to be enjoyed slowly. But what I’m really trying to say here is that everyone is at a different stage of their journey.
Some of us are twenty-one years old and in the springtime of our lives. We carry ourselves with that supreme confidence, as though the world was put here just for us, a sort of “pop-up stage” that God threw together in the last few days before our birth. With our pristine skin and devilish good looks, we don’t doubt that we will be snapped up on the love market soon.
And then we turn forty – the big four-oh, as we like to call it – which is perhaps one of the most confusing decades for us all. We now, fully aware of what lies ahead, begin to desperately cling to our youth, the so called “mid-life crisis” and mums with grown up children suddenly decide to dye their hair bright green and take up free climbing as a hobby.
And as we trundle through that decade, proudly saying “age is just a number”, we slowly begin to realise that, while this might be an encouraging maxim, it really isn’t entirely true, and the trials and indignities we suffered through our forties thoroughly prepare us for a more laid-back fifties.
“Listen, man, I’m older now, and there’s no point fighting it forever, so I might as well just lay back, take a holiday to Greece and finish that novel I’ve been writing since I was in my twenties. Alcohol? Oh, no! I stopped that waaaay back in my forties when a hangover became a game over. Yeah, when I started crashing my car into my garden fence on the way to the supermarket for a third bottle.”
But seriously, I’m being a little ridiculous now. Even at fifty, you’re still not in as bad shape as those poor souls in their seventies and eighties. Look at them! They’re never going to write a book! They’re never going to attend a board meeting about a crazy new product they’re launching (they might but let’s be honest, the percentage is gonna be low).
Their lives have been reduced to sitting round coffee tables with a small group of trusted friends, talking about the “good old days” and the price of washing-up liquid. It used to be two shillings when I were a lass!
I might be joking but when I were a lass, you could buy fish and chips for around £2.50 and a pack of ten cigarettes for roughly the same price (half price if you were under 10). The world does change and no matter how hard we try, there comes a time when we cease to change with it.
The thing I’m starting to see (or perhaps I’m just priming myself for old age), is that no one is better or worse off. No matter if you’re seventeen or seventy, we all have problems, we all have things to deal with. So next time you see that middle-aged woman looking at you with a mixture of envy and curiosity, take the time to smile at her. One day it will be you sitting in her place.