SUDDEN ONSET AGEING

This year has been brutal. I've now spent more than eight months of it trudging backwards and forwards between work, the hospital and home since the beginning of the second week of January and here we find ourselves already cutting deeply into October and still it goes on like a never-ending torment in my own particular circle of hell.

Reluctantly spending so much time in my mother's company has hardly been a joy, either, as I've never been a fan of being around decaying, failing bodies at the best of times, not least because it serves as a terrible reminder of my own mortality, but also because my mother's own raging against the dying of the light appears to involve lashing out at everyone else as if, just by being alive and comparatively healthy, somehow it must be their fault that she continues to suffer such indignities.

Which in some way it probably is.

If only I hadn't followed my artistic instincts but had instead gone into the world of high finance, or some other profession where gaining as much personal wealth as possible was the prime motivation, maybe I'd now have enough hard-leeched cash to let her see out the rest of her days in the luxurious, pampered surroundings that she so obviously believes that she ought to be living in.

Meanwhile, having been in so many of those Wards full of elderly people, I'm becoming utterly convinced that old age is catching.

It's an infection.

It's a disease.

Spend too much time in its company and it will seek you out and then it simply seeps into you, and gnaws away at you, chomping away at whatever youth and vitality that you've managed to hang on to and spitting it out, raw and festering and ghastly in its arbitrary, callous disregard for whatever you might have thought you had planned for yourself and your future.

Until this year, I thought that I'd been weathering rather well for a man of my great age. There was still a relatively full head of hair on the top of my head and the vast majority of it was still in the original specified colour. Any narcissistic moments spent in budgie-like perusal of my own face in the mirror would, occasionally, make me feel as if the ravages so far hadn't been too bad, and whilst the number of days when my self-confidence escapes me and I feel that I'm looking at a particularly unpleasing potato is still relatively high, the days when I felt good about my appearance did, at least, still occur every once in a while.

The fatigue I've been feeling seems only natural given the levels of depression and anxiety I've been suffering from recently as I've juggled this and that and tried to keep things going in the face of chaos and adversity.

But when ageing starts to happen, it happens really fast.

First the teeth started to ache more often than seemed usual, and the bleeding returned, possibly because I was grinding my teeth in the night, or perhaps because my diet of hastily grabbed pseudo-meals was not as healthy as once it was, or maybe it is just gum disease and the glass jar of acrylic molars is mere weeks away from me now.

Then, one morning, I had a tremendously painful back spasm which sent secondary pain shooting up and down my leg as if all the little demons which had been whispering in my mind had suddenly decided to have a "sexy-party" in my nervous system and start poking everything they could with their tiny tridents. This floored me for a day or two, only to ease off before returning with increasing frequency ever since. Usually, incidentally, whenever I go for a bit of a lie down...

As growing levels of exhaustion overwhelm me, I find that, more and more, I just want to walk away from it, wash my hands of it and for it to be done with.

To be over.