Missives and epistles

 'Course, when you get to my age you start getting lots of letters from the NHS. Like this one:

Dear Mr Musgrove,

Please stop sending us pieces of shit on sticks. We have more than enough to be getting on with.

Love and kisses
The Poo Clinic

 

Stock romance

"Do you think I should colour my hair?" I asked.

"There's not enough Bisto left in the world to do it," replied The Small Object of Desire.

Ever-decreasing circles

That nice Wendy, blaming Scarlet, has awarded me another copy of the award I got the other day off Savannah. Which mean that I have a Reality Award and bar, which is dead good and demonstrates once and for all that I'm not away with the fairies. Thank you. 

And now for the four questions. The good thing is that I'm now at an age where an already-tenuous grasp of reality combined with a failing memory will probably come up with entirely different answers...

1. If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?
I'd like the people I care about not to have to worry about health or money or anything.

2. If you could repeat any age which would it be?
I'd be tempted to go back to my early twenties and give myself a massive kick up the arse. Having said that, I suspect I'm a better person now for having been such a prat then.

3. What really scares you?
Life.

4. If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be? 
A man in a shed on a warm summer's evening painting a rocking chair for the woman who's just given him a cup of tea.

I am now moved to pass the meme on to somebody who's blog has touched me lately. If you're reading this you're eligible. 

Should have gone to voice over

I am sore vexed by an advert on the telly. For spectacles. Sore vexed. It involves a grey-haired bloke sidling up to a mirror and saying:

"It's goodbye Trevor, and..."

He dons his glasses

"It's hello to..."

And that's the bit I can never catch. I'm convinced he says "Tito," which makes sense because he looks like Marshall Tito, but it doesn't seem right even for a spectacles advert.

Tramlines of the mind

My dad used to work in Norbury's Printers in Old Trafford and although that, and all the other small factories that lined Elsinore Road, have been gone this past twenty years it still seems strange to see the place converted into a tram depot.

It's a changing world and I'm conscious that I'm slowing down. The first signs that the world was getting a bit fast for me came in the aftermath of the bomb in Manchester. All of a sudden, my lovely old city with the Lino a bit tatty round the edges was having facelifts and makeovers and whatnot. These days you can't move for designer doodads and footballers' danglies. 

Then they decided to turn the Pomona Docks into a small Manhatten skyline of empty offices and renamed part of Salford MediaCityUK. Where once was the U.C.P. tripeworks now there are sharp young men tweeting in CamelCase.

It wasn't all better in Th'owd days, no of course it wasn't. But I could keep up with it all.

Confused metrics

I've mentioned before that mine is the last generation to be able to get its head around the concept of rods, poles or perches. The Small Object Of Desire And Moon Of My Delight tells me that hers is the confused generation:

"I know how long a metre or a mile is but I've no idea of yards or kilometres."

Styx

Visiting friends for a meal and a fillum I felt I had to excuse the walking stick.

"Knees a bit dodgy," I explained.

"Probably sensible in this weather," they replied.

When did we get this old?

Movember

I'll be glad when I can take this moustache off at the end of the month. In some lights it makes me look as if I'm going prematurely grey.

Intimations of mortality

Advert on the telly:

"The definitive punk anthems collection. Buy it for your dad for Father's Day."

I'll be the one in the corner sticking safety pins in me zimmer frame.

By their junk mail we shall know them

I'm sorry to harp on, but...

Here I am at the peak of manliness, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound and sometimes able to heave myself up off the sofa unattended. I expect I match up to no end of testosterone-rich demographics and I even take the rubbish out to my own dustbin. All this is of no avail when it comes to impressing the young postlady. Does my morning mail include invitations to goat-tethering parties in the realms of the man-eating tiger? Glossy brochures advertising world-saving adventure with chaps in brogues? Moustache wax catalogues?

No, no and no again.

This morning we have:

• Invitations to subscribe to:
• The Oldie
• Women's Realm
• Buchan's Football Monthly
• A catalogue telling me that "It's never too warm to wear Damart!"
• Fliers for:
• Tonic Wine
• The Whitley Bay Tourist Board
• The Help the Aged Rent-a-Commode Service
• Remedial assitance for erectile disfunction (this last in green ink in trembly handwriting)

A lad can have no illusions these days.

Mirror, mirror...

One of those days where I realise that I've stopped playing at middle age as I'm fast approaching it.

Film star looks

I looked at a stray mirror in passing and Cecil Parker stared back at me.

Career choices

I'm at that funny age now. That one where a lad gets to review whatever it is he's made of his life. Reluctantly I have to admit that my international sex kitten days are probably behind me. The best I can hope for, then, is to become A National Treasure.

I expect I'll have to buy some cardigans.

Scrape

I hate shaving.

For many years I hid behind facial hair, worried lest my boyish good looks somehow diminished my professional gravitas. Not only did this give passers-by the (entirely spurious) impression that I was someone of depth and probity like Grizzly Adams or Bakelite Smith's Uncle Arthur, it also spared me the daily morning ritual of leaving half my face and a good deal of blood in the sink before staggering out to work.

All good things must come to an end, alas. Overnight my beard went from dark, burnished splendour to tortoiseshell ginger and white. Colleagues at work sent me job adverts for Santa Claus at Xmas and one of the Branch Managers made a convincing case for my having been Edward VII's auntie. The facial hair had to go and I had to start shaving again.

Every so often I try to get away with it for a day or two. It's no use: you can't get away with designer stubble when your beard goes white. In the past, a bit of growth could lend me the rugged air of a Dickie Attenborough or Anna Neagle. Nowadays it just looks like my face has gone mouldy.

Adipose

I'm going to have to stop my mother reading the Sunday tabloids. It makes me feel old. The latest story that caught her eye involved a lady with naturally unfeasibly-large breasts (a hundred-and-odd double Z).

The big problem for me is my reaction. Am I assailed by testosterone-fuelled thoughts of ladies with big tits? Or puerile titterings about Norma Snockers? No. My reaction was:

The poor woman. She must get shocking backache.

Role modelling

A conversation with my father:

"Do you like my new shirt?"

"Err... yes, very nice."

"I like the colour. The only problem is that it buttons up on the wrong side."

"It's a lady's blouse."

"Aye, I know."

"Is there something you want to tell me?"

"It's really comfortable, too."

It's true: you do get to an age where you don't give a shit any more and just go with the comfort.

One of those moments

I'm old. Officially. I heard myself saying one of those things that old people say.

I was round at my parents when my tiny niece pottered round to say hello and cadge a few biscuits. She decided she wanted to go to the loo so I accompanied her up the stairs to do the necessary. (My mum's knees aren't clever so they've got one of those raised loo seats with the side bars; small people without step ladders need a hand to get up and onto it.) Having done her business she pulled off a pile of toilet roll to wipe herself down. And then a bit more to be on the safe side. Having filled the bowl with paper she started to pull some more off the roll.

"You don't need all that toilet paper!" I protested.

"Yes, I do!" she retorted.

And that's when I said it.

"There are little babies starving in China..."

Tempus thingy

I don't know why this is but it came as a bit of a surprise the other day to realise that Cyndi Lauper, in concert locally, is 55. I've always seen her as being a good few decades younger than Mad Donna.

Nicholas Parsons was 85 last week, less of a shock but still an eye-opener. He does well for himself.

And being a gentleman I wouldn't care to say how old Joan Bakewell is but I still fancy her something rotten.

Just goes to show: there may still be hope for those of us in our dotage.

Old men forget

Talking to friends about the old days we generally drift towards the subject of our student days and inevitably we recall the time that Uncle Sean decided that James Joyce needed a birthday party and made a Guinness jelly and a cake and all the trimmings. And the Arnold Bax memorial headache. And Ingrid...

I lost track of Uncle Sean a few years back. I hope the old lad's tamed his demons and is looking after himself. Or, better still, is being looked after by someone who makes a decent cup of tea and likes draught Stravinsky.

I'm still damned if I can remember why we got into a fist-fight about the music of Georges Martinù though.

Decrepitude

I blame that Mrs. Pouncer. Actually, it's not really her fault but I'm happy to lump some of the responsibility on somebody else. But she did claim that I am of a certain age in the first place.

I went to visit one of my friends a while back. I noticed that she had lots of photos of a pretty young woman dotted all about the house. Given that she'd gone through a messy divorce and was deeply embittered about men I wondered out loud if she'd decided to dip into a different selection box for a change.

"That's my daughter!"

"Should she be wearing skirts that short at her age?"

"She's 21."

This came as a considerable shock. It's very difficult being Peter Pan when your contemporaries insist on having grown-up children.

Things got worse when one of my friends mentioned that his son was coming up to Manchester to study at university.

"He's a bit advanced educationally isn't he?" I asked.

"He's nineteen."

"Bollocks, it was only a couple of years ago he was literally knee-high."

"That was ten years ago. Face it man, you're as old as me and we're nearly fifty."

Nearly fifty? Nonsense. Lies. Not true. I have older siblings who are not yet fifty so I can't possibly be "nearly fifty". No. I am, in fact, a slip of a thing of twenty-five.

"You weren't twenty-five when you were that age," he tells me.

It's true. Some mornings I wipe the blood off my face and wonder who the old man is who's looking out of the shaving mirror. In some lights my hair looks almost grey and a day's shaving stubble makes it look like I've fallen victim to some fungal disease.

And what have I done with all that time and opportunity?

What an utter waste.