SUDDENLY OLD

I know that I’ve always had a slightly “old-fashioned” way of looking at the world. I realise that my points of view and opinions really don’t seem to fit all that well in this world in which we live, but I am prepared to admit that, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that they ever have. The world to me has always been a strange and mysterious place, but I rather suspect that it always will. People, and by that I mean “people”, and their strange and, quite frankly bewildering ways of going about their lives, have always been a bit of a mystery to me and, quite frankly, in most cases, I could quite happily exist without a great many of them. I was always pretty convinced that I was “born forty” and somehow I imagine that I’ve just spent my entire life waiting for everyone else to “just grow up” although that seems to be something of an anathema to many people who share my generation, and many more in the one coming after it.

“Growing old gracefully” just seems to have become, like myself, a thing of the past.

However, over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve suddenly started to feel as if I’ve actually got old, as if the sands of time have started to run out, and the old man in the mirror who’s always been there is now actually an old man in the mirror. Still, as they say, getting older is far more preferable than the alternative, although some days I’m not exactly too sure about the validity of that argument..

“You’re getting to that age…”

The doctor’s said it, the practice nurse has said it, the optician’s said it, heck, even the beloved has said it. I’ve been known to mutter it at myself into the mirror from time to time.

I mean, the grey hairs and their “pepper and salt” effect which is now looking more like the slush after a snowfall (although I’m still preferring the grey over the pink option when it comes to my own dome), and the indelible lines carved into the face have been there for a while now, and I’ve been on that daily regime of pills for quite a few years now (which I always promised myself would never happen), but other things, other more worrying concerns have been creeping in lately, things that speak of the sharpening of scythes and a general slow descent into deterioration, degradation and woe.

You might think to look at that I’ve already been like this for a very long time and you might very well be right, but its just taken me personally much longer than everyone else to actually notice...

I’m not completely without any self-awareness, however. I have, in the past, already started to notice a few things about which I am less certain than I once was. My driving, for example, seems to be getting worse. Now I’m not quite in the “soft brimmed hat 10 m.p.h.” brigade yet, although some of the people stuck behind me might be forced to disagree with me on that, but I am rather less self assured than once I was about such things, and I have noticed a strange tendency to feel less confident than I once was behind the wheel and my concentration sometimes seems less focused than it used to be.

Recently the memory had started to play little tricks and, as well as that, the memory has started to play little tricks.

(Hah! Bleeding hah!)

I’ve also started noticing that increasing sense of vagueness and doubt about things that I was once so very sure about, and I seem to be getting more convinced that the world has somehow passed me by and that I’ve managed to rather “waste” my one shot at this “living” mullarkey on things that really, in the end, weren’t all that important.

Then I’ve noticed a creeping sense of nostalgia affecting many of the things I do. I’m not quite yet at the “in my day” stage, but I really can’t imagine that it’s that far away.

Oddly enough, there’s also been a growing sense of what I can only really refer to as “the fear”, and that’s the most surprising thing of all. You’d think that once you had less to lose, you’d worry about things less, but I’ve discovered that, instead you seem to get more scared of losing the things you’ve got, and by that I don’t mean material things, all the stupid “stuff” you accumulate on your way through a life, but the more important things, the things that an arbitrary act of unkindness, or a rather too virulent bug, can take away from you without a moment’s thought.

That and your hopes and dreams, of course…

I’ve kind of got used to the endless feelings of tiredness that overwhelm me every single day, even though things like a good night’s sleep seem increasingly difficult to find.

And talking of things being difficult to find, where did I put my car keys down…?

Extreme tiredness combined with insomnia… What the hell is that all about…? I’ll be thinking about taking afternoon naps next…

Alongside all that, there has, of late, started to be an increase in those little aches and pains that I used to shrug off but which are now becoming persistent enough for words like “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome” or “Rheumatism” or “Arthritis” to tiptoe softly and terrifyingly across the back of my mind. Last weekend I went to pick up a plate out of the cupboard to put my pending toast onto and got a shooting pain through my wrist that stayed with me, suddenly and painfully, on-and-off for three days.

This, as they say, was not good.

I’ve started to worry far too much about my spine since my mother’s has started to curl up and twist like a broken corkscrew. Do I share enough of that DNA for mine to be destined to go in much the same way? Does my lifestyle of mostly being hunched up over keyboards and steering wheels, or slouching on a couch watching TV mean that mine is going to fuse into much the same shape? Is there anything at all that I can do to avoid this fate…?

Worries, worries… It’s all a constant worry…

And I haven’t even got around to the fact that my stomach no longer seems capable of consuming anything without there being some sort of unfortunate side-effect, or the strange new mole which appeared upon my face only two months ago but now seems to be insisting on becoming a brand new feature of my face. I’ve said nothing about the constant trips to the bathroom when I drink even slightly too much coffee when I arrive at work in the morning, or about my general clumsiness and a lack of co-ordination which, I’ll admit, I’ve probably always had but I’m now becoming increasingly aware of as I break crockery (you should see our chipped crockery collection, courtesy of my washing up...) and fall over the furniture with alarming regularity. Then there are the more subtle things like style choices and not caring about certain things like what I am wearing, my appearance in general, or designer labels, or rinky-dinky new gadgets.

I’ll also admit I think I spend far too much time contemplating my mother’s DNA and finding parallels, even though, deep down, I know that nothing is carved in tablets of stone, none of it is inevitable, and the outcome of a lot of these things is, as yet, undecided, and that in all probability, how any or all of those things turn out is rather down to me and how I act from now on. However, it still bothers me that the easiest route, the path of least resistance, is the one that leads directly to me turning out much like she has and it is, quite frankly, terrifying.

The most worrying development of all is the sense that my eyesight has been getting worse recently. The inability to stare at words on a screen or a page for any length of time, and the fact that I now need to remove my glasses to be able to read anything at all. My father used to say that he considered that, in many ways, his deafness was far worse than blindness because it was a less visible disability and so people just presumed that you were an idiot, but I don’t really think that I could ever agree with him about that. In the end, apart from obvious audible loss of the cricket commentaries, I’m not really interested enough in music to miss it all that much, but reading, artwork, films and TV pretty much sum up all of the things I love to do with my life, and to lose the visual element would be, to me, a loss that I really think that I couldn’t bear.

Sometimes I get these things which I can only really describe as “genetic flashbacks” I find myself curling my lip in a particular way and I am reminded of my grandmother, or I find that I’m trying to read favouring just one eye and I am reminded of my grandfather. I rub my forehead and in my mind’s eye, I can see my father doing exactly the same thing, and I look at my mother as she crumbles these days and so many of the tics she exhibits and those annoying little mannerisms she has, as well as some of the more troubling aspects of her personality and biology are manifesting themselves in me...

The strangest thing of all is how quickly it seems to have come on over the past couple of months, as if someone just flipped a switch and I woke up “old”. But at least I’m still planning on going down with dignity. Not for me this rather sad-looking modern tendency to try and dress ten, twenty or even thirty years younger than really seems appropriate. Oh no! I will continue to mock and pour scorn upon those people who want to dress up just like their children and fall for the farcical flattery of idiots pandering to them and saying patently untrue “you look just like sisters”, God help ’em…

That’s not for me. I’m going down the route of being a “grumpy old git” and nothing’s going to stop me now…!