There's a crude poem about getting old, I won't print it all but if you want to see it just Google the last two lines:
"The Golden Years Have Come At Last.
The Golden Years Can Kiss My **!
When I was 19, I remember coming out of a dance venue as the heavens opened up. As luck would have it I saw a taxi with the "For Hire" sign lit up. I hailed the cab, and as it pulled over and I made a dash through the rain, a little old lady got in the way. We did one of those street dances, I went left, so did she. I went right, so did she. To my eternal shame I muttered: "Doddering old fogey." She heard me. A crooked arthritic index finger was raised. "You'll be old," she screeched. "Not as old as you," I replied and just laughed as I jumped into the taxi.
Down through the decades that voice has rattled around my head whenever some age related medical complaint has risen. And now I am old, or so the distance between my birth and now dictates.
How do I deal with it, much the same way as when I was young really. We struck lucky in that we bought a house in Hackney in East London when it was a district you only lived in because you either had to, as in a council house, or you couldn't afford to buy a property elsewhere. Then somehow Hackney became a hotspot, it became gentrified, desirable. When we sold up we made a tidy profit. Who would have thought?
Today, we enjoy a wonderful social life with a wide circle of friends, a great mix of generations and although we don't have any children, our Godchildren who have all grown up and whose weddings we attended have all produced their own children. It's like surrogate Grandchildren.
My wife and I have known each other for over 54 years, been married for 52 of them. Now retired, she indulges her life long passion of making her own clothes, and others, mostly mine, but recently she made a friend's wedding dress. She has a bespoke cabin that I treated her to, a collection of vintage sewing machines adorn the cabin walls and she has a couple of modern machines and an overlocker. She loses herself in her cabin.
My hobbies are the old vintage car that I have and a collection of records that go back to the pre-war swing era, I have a jukebox to play them on. My other hobby is work. I get some flak about that, but as my wife said, "If he's happy working, let him do it. There's not many who can say that they get paid for indulging in their hobby." I only work two shifts a week, job sharing with someone whose military pension left him with too much month at the end of his money.
We have been life long ballroom dancers and it was dancing that got us into the social circle that we so enjoy. The lockdown, or house arrest as I prefer to call it, has curtailed this year's events and that's how I managed to get on line. Never had the time nor the inclination previously. Well not exactly, I have lurked on this site for quite a long time. Reading about other's grandchildren and other facets of life is fascinating.
It's curious to me, I certainly don't want to live forever, on the other hand, I love life, not ready to pop off just yet. But this getting old malarky does have a few pitfalls, like the hip replacement that I had a while back. That, coupled with the house arrest, is going to make tripping the light fantastic something of a challenge when our release date comes. But in the meantime the everyday posts here keep me motivated.
