A Brief History of Time

Ok, so in 2011 I turned forty and, apart from a few months of hard physical training to prove to myself, and others, that forty did not mean I was 'over the hill', the reaching of this milestone was pretty painless and uneventful. No biblical plagues, nothing fell off my body, the skies didn't fall in. So what's the fuss all about being forty??

However, when I hit forty one something clicked. Not physically I might add, I wasn't suddenly stuck down by an accelerated ageing process. I was now a 'forty something', which strangely felt a lot worse than one year more than forty. In fact, despite being closer to forty it now felt like I was more on my way to fifty and hell everyone knows you're as good as dead after that!

Perhaps this sounds a little extreme, but a few years ago my dad started drawing up our family tree and has made great progress tracing the lineage back hundreds of years. It made fascinating reading, until I started to notice something, something disturbing. It caught my eye and I soon started studying the tree more closely flicking from one record to the next and there it was in front of me in black and white. No male in my line has ever lived past  the age of seventy one! My granddad died at sixty five of a heart attack and my own dad has already had heart surgery. The signs were not looking good.

Working with figures day in day out it didn't take my subconscious long to work out that based on this new found knowledge I had just thirty years left in me. At best. It felt like the whistle had just blown at half time of the big game.  Heck, I was past half way and that was the half with fresh legs, the best health.

So, mentally I'm now back in the changing room and its time to review how the first half of the game had panned out. Truth is I'm not too sure, I haven't been paying too much attention, a bit like the fat kid in school you used to stick in goal who would spend all his time leaning against the goal post picking his nose until a ball whistled past his ear followed by the torrent of abuse from his team mates. Trying to assess the situation I can't help but think of the lyrics of the Talking Heads song 'Once In A Lifetime' when it poses a similar quandary:

"And You May Find Yourself In A Beautiful House, With A Beautiful Wife

And You May Ask Yourself - Well...How Did I Get Here?"

To which the answer appears to be "letting the days go by" and I guess that about sums it up. I've never really been one for direction in my life, I've just ambled my way through as if sitting in an old inflatable car tyre meandering down a river letting the current take me where it wishes.

So is this going to be another blog detailing a man's mid-life crisis. I hope not. For starters I'm not convinced about the whole mid-life crisis thing. Propaganda I tell you! Sure there are definite symptoms but crisis? Oddly, I think it doesn't start to make sense until you get there yourself. It's not about desperate attempts to regain your youth. It's about something entirely more daunting.

Growing up you have your whole life ahead of you, the world is indeed your oyster and with that in mind you push it to one-side whilst you get on with important stuff like drinking until you vomit and trying to put your hands in girls bras. What's the hurry, you've got years ahead of you right? That is until twenty years later (not that I am suggesting I spent twenty years drinking until I vomited and putting my hands in girls bras) you find yourself where I now am, and the realisation that you're running out of time and health to do all of those things that you once aspired to.

Whatever happened to the plans to run a marathon, see the world, learn guitar, surf/dive the Great Barrier Reef, canoe the Ardeche, trek the Amazon, blah, blah. What about that sports car your couldn't afford when you were a young man and then couldn't afford when you became a father, then was far too impractical when the family grew, and has now reached classic status and commands a sale price that once again you can't afford. 

As I say, the cliche symptoms are not about regaining your youth, it's about trying to do all those things that you never quite got around to in your youth and now consider you  may not, ever.

I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT I WANT TO BE WHEN I GROW UP!

Perhaps that's not so odd but what you do start to do is to form an opinion on what you DON'T want to be when you grow up...