A well-known and, I believe, highly respected political commentator and journalist was recently reported as having described bloggers as pimply-faced, angry young men, loners who spend many hours hunched in front of their computers in their mothers' basements. Well, Mr Marr, I have news for you. I might not surf the blogosphere to any great extent, but neither I nor the authors of any of the blogs I have looked at really match that description. I certainly don't. I don't have a pimply face, unless the pimples are hidden by my beard; I don't think I am particularly angry; I may not have hundreds of friends but I do have several very good ones so I'm not a loner, and my mother is dead so I can't use her basement - not that she ever had one anyway. And I'm most certainly not young.
This last fact was brought home to me the other day by a workman we had in the house. He was here all morning that day, installing a new front door. Yes, we finally managed to get a quote we could accept (I won't say a quote we liked - they were all too high for happiness) and the door was delivered and installed this week. Anyway, the chap who came to do the job brought his radio with him and it was playing in the hall all morning. He had it tuned to a station called UK Gold or something, a station which, between commercial breaks, played records from the 60s, 70s and 80s. I recognised, and was able to sing along with, far too many of them and it was this that brought home to me just how much I have become like my father and thousands of other fathers and mothers who complain that the music their children play is absolute rubbish compared with what they used to play at the same age.
'Oh, no,' I thought. 'I'm not just getting old, I am old!'
True enough. I have not yet used up my allotted span of three score years and ten, but that day is, if not a storm about to break over my head, rather more than a distant raincloud on the horizon. It is only three generations since anyone of my class living to the age I am now would be considered not just old but truly ancient. They would have spent more than fifty years working in the fields in all weathers and by now would be crippled with arthritis, sitting by the fire wrapped in a blanket and shouting, 'Eh? What?' as they waved their ear trumpet. That, of course, is assuming they were still the right side of the turf, and the chances of that would surely be no better than evens.
It's not as though I feel old. I feel older, certainly. In fact, I am well aware that my body is no longer able to do what it did just a few short years ago. It seems but a year or two since I was well able to put in a morning digging over the vegetable plot. Nowadays half an hour is about the longest stretch I can manage. Likewise, I used to be quite happy drinking half a bottle of wine with my evening meal. Nowadays a glass and a half is about all I can manage without starting to lose the plot. So perhaps I do feel old - in body if not in mind.
And there's the rub. I'm pretty sure that even though I retired from work more than eight years ago, my mind is still reasonably sharp. I still manage to complete (all bar one or two answers) the cryptic crossword in my daily paper - and have learned to do sudoku as well. I have even written two books. Granted, they are both short ones and will never be published, let alone published to critical acclaim, except by means of so-called vanity publishing. The web sites I have designed in my retirement may not be the ultimate in sophistication, but they don't look unduly amateurish (to my mind) - and they work.
So I am in the autumn of my days, although as yet the leaves have still to fall. Well, some of them - I do have an incipient bald spot. But autumn can be a wonderful season and I am determined to make the most of it, or as much of it as I can. I still have good health, I have all my marbles and I am comfortable financially. Yes, there are things in my life I wish I could change, principally my wife's health, but I can't, so I'll be happy with what I have. As the Lions' grace has it:
'Give us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.'
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