I’ve got an absolutely mad few months coming up. As well as the usual sun and sea holiday in a couple of weeks time, I’ve got a long-awaited twin-centre (Ottawa and Vancouver) family trip to look forward to, followed by a solo trip to Rotterdam, the home of my mother. I probably can’t afford all these holidays and trips but I have putting some of them off for years. Recent events have brought it home to me that time waits for no man or woman and that sometimes life ends much earlier than you were hoping it would.
Losing two friends last year, one of whom was a very close friend who was much younger than me, rocked me to my very core. Throughout lockdown, we had been promising to meet for a drink, maybe some rugby league (watching, not playing) and just generally laughing about old times. A cancer diagnosis and a subsequent rapid decline soon put paid to any of that. I knew also that it could easily be me.
At least the men on my paternal side have managed to achieve a decent age. My dad scraped 81 and his dad made it into his 90s. The women, however, did not do so well; few if any (I can’t think of one) making it even into their eighties. In terms of life expectancy, I am not anticipating surpassing any of them, but we can but hope. Either way, it’s time to get on with stuff before it’s too late.
Having dithered and acted as if I was going to live forever – and as a young man, I was convinced that I would – the realisation that I was in the latter stages of life and not the beginning came as the shock it shouldn’t have been.
I have been creaking for years as every football injury I have ever suffered has come back to haunt me. Indeed, in the last few days I have been revisited by an old lower back injury which occurred in 1982. You would think that the body might just have overcome the weakness by now, but 41 years on and here I am struggling out of bed in the morning and having to be dried when I emerge from the shower because it hurts too much to bend. Another vivid reminder of what awaits me as I become part of the geriatocracy, a term I have just invented. Soon, I won’t be able to do any of this stuff.
I can still manage the European sun holiday which this year will take place in Formentera, off Ibiza. This is the relax on a sun bed, have a swim in the sea and “Could I have a pint of Estrella please, señor?” holiday which requires little more than the ability to stay awake long enough to read from the small library of books I have taken with me. But Canada will involve doing things and sightseeing, as well as seeing much-loved and much-missed family and four flights, including two long haul and one of well over five hours, will leave me wanting a holiday. No such luck. The absolute state of me writing that.
The Netherlands in general and Rotterdam in particular comes next and I’ve been meaning to do this forever, tracing the roots of my childhood and not meeting long lost family because they’re all a bit too dead. I’ll stalk the places they used to live at in search of memories (there aren’t ghosts) and I’ll get all nostalgic and melancholy. And I’ll spend at least one day riding the trams to make up for all the time I spent just watching them as a child.
I want to fit in Auschwitz-Birkenau, too, because I have always said everyone should go there at least once but I have not been there at all. That’s important too because for a time in Rotterdam the Jews were being rounded up to be taken to Westerbork, the Nazi transit camp in the Netherlands, on their way to you-know-where while my family watched on helplessly. Over 100,000 Dutch Jews were murdered in Auschwitz, a considerable number of whom were named Verburg, my Dutch family name. There’s no point in reading too much into that because I have no facts, but were some of them distant relatives?
These things and more I need to do and do soon. I want to go the Manchester Airport visitors centre and I want to watch trains breast Beattock summit in Scotland. I want to visit the Scottish Highlands and Islands and I simply need to see the world’s largest model railway in Hamburg. And I can’t do any of them if I’m dead.
When even putting the bins out requires more physical effort than it used to, you know that this is life, not some trial run. I look out from my Man Cave across the green and every other person seems to be riding a mobility scooter. Even the village paedophile has one. How long before I’m chugging my way down to the pub and hoisting myself to bed on a stairlift? I laugh at this stuff now but if I stop and think for too long, that could be me.
A mad few months, maybe mad few years, may be essential if I am to avoid being confronted with the words ‘What if?’ later in life, assuming I even make later in life. Tomorrow can’t wait any longer. It’s now or never.
