It's my birthday. I'm fifty-blah today. I knew it was coming around again but I'd sort of forgotten. Any spring chicken stripling reading this probably won't understand it, but as I get older my birthdays become less and less important. Only the ones with a zero at the end seem to be worth acknowledging these days.
The Brunette reminded me as soon as I awoke by presenting me with a card and an acoustic guitar. I'd mentioned to her in passing that at some indeterminate time in the future I might consider the possibility of thinking about perhaps attempting to become an axe-shredding rock god, and she's now taken me at my word. The phrase, '
be careful what you wish for', springs to mind.
The guitar is lovely though. It's black and shiny and to my untutored ear it sounds wonderful but I am now obliged to sit down and learn how to play the bloody thing. I'm not entirely tin-eared and I do have a long, undistinguished history of playing in bands, but that's as a drummer. We don't do notes and scales and quavers and semi-tones and all that musical stuff. We just bash things. Well, if my elderly, salami-like fingers can stave off arthritis for long enough to allow me to form a chord or two then I'll give it a go.
As I was getting dressed I said to the Brunette, "
what was it that I needed to go into town for today?" to which she wittily responded without missing a beat, "
dunno, to pick up your pension maybe?". It's good to know that her faculties haven't yet been withered by age!
Advancing years do weird things to you. Any middle aged person will know about the physical changes that passing time wreaks upon the body, such as losing or gaining hair in innapropriate places (as I noted in an earlier post), skin losing its elasticity (in other words, getting saggy) and the act of mere bending causing loud, inarticulate exclamations of pain even though it doesn't really hurt. But there are other, unexpected though not necessarily unwelcome, mutations.
For example, I can now wear hats. I tried this in my younger days and I looked like a complete berk but I now find that a jauntily tipped flat cap or pork pie jazz hat makes me look damn cool...in my opinion. I think my recently adopted Hulk Hogan moustache has something to do with it but cool is definitely the word. Mind you, I do have to remind myself to remove the headgear when I'm indoors or driving. I used to blow a gasket every time I was stuck behind some trilby wearing little old man doing twenty miles an hour on a bendy single carriageway and I really don't want to turn into him.
Still on the subject of going gently into that good night, we watched 'Calendar Girls' for the first time last night. What a cracking film. I knew a little about the story - a bunch of valiant middle aged Women's Institute gals from Yorkshire strip off for their annual fund-raising calendar - but I didn't realise how big it became. Fair play to both the original gals and to the actresses who played them in the movie. It must have taken some serious 'hwyl' to voluntarily display the lumps, bumps and humps that age bestows (
hwyl - pronounced 'hoil' - is a Welsh word that doesn't translate exactly into English but I like to think of it as meaning 'bollocks' - perhaps not the most apt word to use in the circumstances now that I think about it). Absolutely gorgeous, one and all (I'm trying not to single out Helen Mirren or Celia Imrie, but I still have one or two red corpuscles floating around in me).
Finally, I recently read an article about men's waistlines and whereabouts on their bodies they wear their trouser waistbands, depending on their age (the men's, not the trousers). If I remember rightly, it appears that the average teenage lad leaves a gap of five inches between his waistband and his actual waist. By the age of twenty seven it has crept up to the actual waist and at fifty seven, which I am not that far away from, it will migrate northwards to around seven inches below the armpit. The punchline to this article was that, rather than admitting to middle age spread, men in their late fifties and above convince themselves that the increasing gap between their trouser cuffs and their shoes is due to their legs getting longer! I have so much to look forward to.
I'm actually feeling quite positive about Life though. I sense a period of creativity looming during which I'll finally make a decent recording of a song that I wrote many years ago, along with an accompanying video. I'll also complete the screenplay for my side-splittingly jocular, blackly comedic movie starring Rhys Ifans, Ricky Gervais, Martin Freeman, Stephen Mangan, Simon Pegg and James Corden as a group of mates who fly to Las Vegas to celebrate their birthdays, which all happen to fall on the same day. I'd tell you more but you may be tempted to steal my genius.
Then again, I may just fall asleep in the armchair for a few hours.
As Chili Davis (who he?) once said, "
growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional",
oldblodger
