Search This Blog

Pages

Showing posts with label old age. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old age. Show all posts

Tuesday 14 November 2023

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.   


Sunday 27 November 2016

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!