Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Nature Boy

Love this.  Another in my age bracket.  I keep looking at people intently to see how they're managing it.

 I was interested to watch The Cure (previous post).  I'm the same age as Robert Smith.  Getting old is strange and I'm curious to know what others are making of it. Are they, like me, trying to find their way across unknown and potentially difficult terrain with dodgy knees?  On the one hand you are thankful to have made it this far, and in reasonable state.  A few aches and pains,  nothing too drastic.  One mustn't grumble when others are falling off the shelf or clinging on by their fingernails.   Could do with a bit more money ('she failed to plan sufficiently for her retirement'), it's been a tough year,  but that's not everything, far from it.  On the other hand you find it difficult.  Odd.  Mind-blowingly so.  Or, a 'challenge', to use a more positive word.   Death lurks round the corner - but then it always does, no matter your age.  You find yourself looking back at former friendships, temporary alliances, such-like, and seeing them afresh, through eyes that have seen and learned a bit more since then.  It doesn't help that I've a tendency to 'over think'.  Or perhaps it does!  Maybe the thing is just to immerse yourself in a vat of brandy or something and just numb it out.  One of these days it'll all be over anyhow.   But I spent far too many years numbing stuff out when I was young and in any case one would like to have managed to figure a few things out before then - a clear head is required. 

I know of people who spend their time going out for lunches and suppers and taking fancy holidays.  I can't do that,  I can't afford to, and also, even if I could I'm not terribly interested in that kind of thing.  I can still read, listen to music and watch films.  Being out of doors is also vital - keeping in contact with the natural world.  None of these things cost anything, thank goodness. 

There's also the tiresome side issue (as far as I'm concerned) of the different approach of many to the ageing female as opposed to the ageing male.  But I'll just park that rusty Vauxhall in a muddy layby for now.

Keep reasonably active, stay interested, don't look too far ahead, keep an open mind.   The lid of the coffin hasn't quite slammed shut, there's still a sliver of light...

Who knows, who knows.  I hope to have a few more adventures yet.  Donald Trump is 78 and he's president of the USA...Joe Biden is 82 and he's - well, perhaps best not pursue that line of thought, it's too weird.  How old is Vladimir Putin again?  Never let it be said that I lack ambition.

My thoughts turning inwards as November grows darker and stormier.  

Watching Toads is better than the Telly

Toad in the compost bin

All I watch on TV is Walker Texas Ranger relentlessly roundhouse-kicking the crap out of wrong-doers in a ginger wig and the bizarre cheese-fest which is the Six Million Dollar Man. If there's a Gerard Butler film on after that I count myself lucky.   Obviously I don't have a smart TV or Netflix - which is probably just as well for my health because if I did, I'd probably never get off the sofa again with the array of new films and fancy series available.  Whereas the old channels only have a desperate load of recycled rubbish I'd have to be heavily sedated to watch.

This is possibly another consequence of getting old.  You've already seen most of the garbage they churn out.  So, failing anything better being available such as a glossy series on Netflix, you might as well return to the 'source', i.e. the programmes previously mentioned.

I do keep an eye on what's on, ever hopeful, but generally there's nothing that appeals.   Obviously, news programmes are completely unwatchable now.  Which is an odd state of affairs.  

I probably wouldn't mind watching geriatrics' soothing favourite, the Antiques Roadshow, but the husband puts his foot down, and I give in because I'm not that bothered anyway.  I'd be keener on an Antiques Toadshow, presented by David Fattenborough,  an earnest, pastry-loving nature freak who when he isn't presenting programmes about ancient amphibians likes fattening up boroughs.  

A year or two back there were toads in our garden.  They lived in the compost bin and hibernated underneath it (see photo, of toad emerging from hibernation).  Now we have mainly frogs.  I really miss opening the compost bin and being confronted by a large toad (see photo).  They are extraordinary creatures, and far more interesting to watch than the telly.   

Toad, emerging from hibernation

Tune of the Day - Warren Zevon - My Shit's Fucked Up

This is a splendid song,  splendidly performed, on the theme of ageing.  Short and concise.  Unfortunately only available if you click through to Youtube, because of the sweary words presumably.  How fucking stupid is that.  You can watch 'pron' of every possible variety, practically anywhere (which we are led to believe is all fine and dandy - reader, for a number of reasons, it isn't, and I may write about why, later) but you can't listen to the words of a song.

Anyway.  I recommend that you do listen to it.   I've been worrying about my shit getting fucked up i.e. the implications of ageing for about, hmmmm....maybe twelve or thirteen years.  I started worrying when I really didn't need to.  I  thought I was old, but I wasn't, I was merely middle-aged.  Now I've crossed a line where I really am pretty old, it's a different game altogether now and I worry far less about the fucked up shit than I did back then.  Because I'm still here and I appreciate how lucky I am to have made it this far without falling off the ledge.

Life is so weird.  Gloriously so.  I try to live in the moment and I feel blessed to be alive.

Things are gonna get worse. John Cooper Clarke

The maestro says it all about ageing.  A bungalow smelling of piss and biscuits 👍

Ageing is a bastard. Withnail and I - Camberwell Carrot

I'm the same age as Paul McGann.   Getting old would be fine if not for regrets, the bodily decay thing and the ever-more-intrusive looming of Death.

There's also a definite feeling that you should be thankful to have got this far in years without pegging out or becoming disabled and living in John Cooper-Clark's 'piss-stained bungalow' rather than having a whinge about dodgy knees and other embarrassing, undignified and preferably unmentionable things that occur as a process of said bodily decay.  

Which I truly am.  Nevertheless...you have to allow yourself a screaming episode once in a while.  Ageing is a bastard.  It's really bloody awful.

I like this clip.  It's about the end of an era.   

Random Days Doing Nothing Don't Mean the Same Anymore

They just don't.  It's pretty much undoubtedly to do with the sense that there will be fewer of them.  When you're young, or even young-ish, days stretch ahead and boredom seems full of endless possibilities that slowly emerge like sailing ships through fog, adrift upon a mind-smothering and smothered-by-mind miasma which has been formed by doing nothing but sitting for hours in your pyjamas staring at a grey, flat stillness through the window, drinking too many cups of tea, and poking at shapes formed by biscuit crumbs at the bottom of the empty packet, and if you fail to choose one, which invariably you do because it doesn't matter, everything simply slides back into the timeless grey to emerge just the same on another dull day.
It's something to do with infinity and when you're older you know that infinity doesn't exist.  You've lost the courage to imagine it.  You can almost smell encroaching old age it's so close and you fear it.  You fear not managing.  You fear stumbling round the kitchen in a baggy acrylic cardigan and trousers that smell of urine, groping for the kettle with your arthritic fingers and barely seeing where the teabags are through your rheumy eyes and also because you've forgotten and there's nobody there to remind you except the underpaid under-trained nineteen year old care worker who pops in to change your leg bag at lunch-time - at least you hope it's going to be her and not the sixty-three year old care worker who steals from your wallet because she's angry and bitter about the dreadful state of her life and she's got no pension till she's seventy-one and her partner left her for a bloke and her daughter's an internet escort and she's lost all her money buying scratchcards and tattoos and paying off Wonga loans.  During those flat grey hours in your cold and empty house you look back on your cold and empty life and forwards to a cold and empty death.   You look up at the night sky as you struggle up the icy path to put the bin out and you don't wonder as you did when you were young, you don't see wonder, you can't, you only see that the stars are cold and distant and most of them don't even exist any more anyway. they're dead.  You're living on a planet spinning in a hopeless void and you've hardly any time left and it's all been for nothing and you don't know why.

Enjoy your day!