It’s the Missus’ birthday today - something that seems to happen pretty much every year at this time, always managing to beat mine by a good few weeks. She says its just the nature of time and space but I have my suspicions. Quite frankly I suspect she just likes getting all the attention first, but I’m too polite ever to pull her up on that.
Anyway, as another little piece of the “life” in “life-partner” slowly trickles away and the grim reaper gets one step closer to visiting our humble abode for some milk and cookies (or possibly a beer if I’ve remembered to stock the fridge), I can’t help but dwell for a while on my own mortality…
…because I’m starting to feel old.
True, I fully expect my death to be a long, long time off and to feature at least five legendary heroes wielding epic weapons (and no fucking hobbits - or else!), but that doesn’t mean that the signs of age aren’t already beginning to manifest.
Now I’m not talking about the cool things like ageless wisdom and the ability to say outrageously inappropriate things to good looking girls as long as you can make it sound “cheeky”. Nor the really horrible things like age-related illnesses and wearing trousers pulled up to your armpits. I mean the small “on the cusp” things that you don’t even really notice unless you stop and think about it.
For a start, my hair is going.
Now just to clarify, I fully expected this. my maternal line is full of bald or pretending-not-to-be-bald males, and I believe that this is where the genetic lottery takes its mullet cues from. I don’t even mind, truth be told, as the moment it gets too extreme I’ll just shave it all off and rock the Captain Picard look (Earl Grey motherfucker! Do you Drink it?!), but right now my hair seems to be locked in a full-on follicle war with my scalp that it stands no chance of winning but is too bloody stubborn to give up.
I mean, hell, its been a long time since I studied military strategy and tactics at university but even I can recognise that my hair has all but lost the battle of Widow’s Peak and is seriously hard-pressed from an incursion of scalp in the rear. Its pretty much all over bar the shouting now, and I wish my hair would hurry up and recognise that. I look like i stole my hairline from Nicholas Cage, for fuck sake.
Another sign that I must be getting on a bit has been the onset of common sense. Not a lot, I’m relieved to say, but there’s definitely some there. I’ve actually started putting things away so that I can find them easily again and telling the missus off for not doing it, for example, which is horrifying. Plus I’m reasonably confident that if I was told NOT to push a strange big red button right now I actually wouldn’t push it.
Related to this seems to have been a distinct lessening of my tendency to entertain evil and twisted thoughts. Quite frankly there have been several times recently where rather than happily stand there and watch Skateboarders stack it in hilarious and hopefully painful ways outside the bus garage (possibly even thanks to the odd large stick “accidentally dropped” in their landing zone) I’ve had to actively stop myself from saying “Careful guys, that railing looks quite high.”
I’ve started to wonder whether this is why all evil overlords fail in the end. Maybe Sauron took his eye off the ball (or ring in his case) because he was worried about whether he’d left the cooker on, rather than due to the efforts of the Fellowship. It certainly makes more sense than him being outwitted by a couple of hairy-feeted yokels with West Country fucking accents.
Ah well, age is coming and I am no longer the spritely young thing I once was. Best simply to accept it and enjoy the ride I suppose.
Twenty-seven here I come…
