Its my party and I’ll ignore it if I want to…
So, the little hand on the clock of my life ticked over to finish another year yesterday. I’m not big on birthdays. I had a little party with the kids at the weekend. Handmade cards, some flowers picked from the gardens, a box of my favourite chockies and a birthday cake made by all (chocolate with brandy butter filling and a dark chocolate icing, yum).
I can’t say I like this aging lark much. I don’t mind the extra experiences, and the memories are something I wouldn’t do without. It’s the body failing thing. When I hit 35 my formerly flat stomach suddenly bugled an inch. It wasn’t (isn’t, honest) fat, its just you get to the bottom of my ribs and the skin bulges out an extra inch. There’s also this annoying way the skin under my chin hangs a bit rather than having a youthful tight curve.
I have a bad back, I had surgery on it 10 years ago. The result of height and too much exercise as a youth. So long as I do my sit ups and stretches every night, I’m fine. Get lazy for a week and it starts twinging. If I don’t watch out, it will go out, and I’m flat on my back for a day recovering.
I still, thankfully, have my hair, but its just starting to go grey. That’s allowed for a man, adds a bit of dignity, but I’d still rather it just stayed like it was. Then there are the aches and pains. Twinges of what will some day likely be arthritis. The short term memory isn’t what it was. I was never good at remembering people’s names, but now I’m ruddy awful. The eye sight, never grand, is slowly starting to degrade after being stable for a very long time.
Its very bad design. Why can’t we just stay as we were in our prime, until one day the alarm goes off and everything stops? There is everything dignified in experience and knowledge, there is nothing dignified in getting older. The body need not age, it’s the programming that does it, not the mechanics. I think I should write a letter to the times.
Bah humbug and balderdash.