Still Crazy After All These Years

“HOW old are you? Christ, you don’t look it.”

“Thanks, it must be all that clean-living.”

That’s my standard reply to anyone who says, very kindly, that I don’t look my age. I don’t feel much different to how I was when I was 35 – 30 years ago today – and I certainly don’t act my age, although the aches and pains of every football injury I ever had come to visit every time I get up from my chair or my bed.

I’ve still got most of my hair, which is a miracle of sorts since both my grandfathers were bald by the time they reached their early twenties, and the very least I should have today would be a Terry Wogan combover or a Michael Fabricant wig. Yet, my hair remains stubbornly brown without any assistance from Grecian 2000 or whatever hair dye is called today. Anyone who knows me understands that I would be the very last person on Earth to go to the trouble of using hair dye, although my latest beard is a curious mish-mash of brown, grey and white.

The beard has the added advantage of covering up part of my face. I have always had a degree of self-loathing and a visit to the barber, meaning I have to look at myself for half an hour or so, is my idea of hell. It is also why you will never see me posting a selfie of myself on social media. I see all the bad bits and anyway I appear in most pictures to be suffering from Bell’s Palsy. I am the complete opposite of social media friends who think nothing of posting gurning pictures of themselves, presumably because they lack the self-loathing I carry with me every day. As I get older, always assuming I do get older, things can only get worse.

For most of my life, I had been expecting 26th January 2022 to be the day I started get my state pension. But multimillionaire shitbag former chancellor George Osborne stole over £8000 from me by putting it back until I was 66. And he never even asked me. If he had – and he really should have – I’d have been very clear with him: “I have paid National Insurance all my working life, except when I worked for charities where I didn’t earn enough to pay NI, and I was promised that when I was 65, I’d get some of it back.” I don’t even get a bus pass, although I can visit the cinema for a reduced price AND get free biscuits, which is a clear bonus for being an old fart.

So, what does being old feel like? Well, it’s better than the alternative, that’s for sure. Every couple of years I provide a ‘stool’ sample to check if I have bowel cancer. Now and again, a doctor checks my prostate – “Are you using your whole hand, doctor?” – and in March I have my first AAA screening test. The latter will be to test for an abdominal aortic aneurysm, basically a swelling in the aorta, something that is well worth doing because it might kill me if I have, and very quickly.

Another thing about being old is that hair starts to grow where you don’t want it to grow and not where you do. My ears and nose are prime examples, as well as my shoulder blades, although the latter are basically wild tufts. If they develop into anything, I suppose I can become a human donkey jacket. Even my pubic hair beginning to thin. Still, as long as my head has a decent covering, I mustn’t complain.

65, eh? It was only about five minutes ago I left Briz School, started work at the DHSS in Bedminster which was four months after I saw Steely Dan at the Bristol Hippodrome, got married, got divorced, got married again (to the right person this time, obvs) and then retired from the same employer I started with in 1974. A few things happened in the middle and soon, my loyal reader, you will be able to live about the Briz years in my memoir, which has a name but I won’t reveal it just now in case someone nicks it. You really can’t trust anyone these days.

For those of you who in my world, thanks for putting up with me. It means a lot to me even if it might not always feel that way.  I’m still crazy after all these years, but amazingly, to me at least, I’m still standing. I can’t really ask more from life.