I like the notion that today I will have completed 75% of my personal century. This at least offers some hope for the future, a target. But it’s a target that you are not at all sure you want to hit. Who wants to be one hundred years old? But, ask again, who wants to be 95? 90? 85? … going down … no, stop there. 85 is OK isn’t it? You can live with the idea of being 85. That’s just ten years to go. But people of 85 are really old, falling to bits old, wrinkled to buggery old, brain-wandering old, incontinently old. Aren’t they? Not all of them. Yesterday morning I help restore to a standing position a lady who had tripped and fallen in a shop. She was perfectly sound and unshaken but she was horizontal. As I elevated her she smiled and thanked me and told me she was 91. She was in good shape this lady. Oh yes, she went on to tell me that she goes to the gym and that, I remembered, was where I had last seen her. She does go to the gym. As I do. You don’t see her knocking the hell out of the treadmill but she does exercise, albeit gently, and that, perhaps, is why she neither looked nor sounded decrepit. So 91 is OK then.
That’s just 16 years more. I can do that, I guess. If I can hold it together for 16 more years then … then I know, I just know, that I’ll want to push on for the next nine years.
It’s a harmless exercise is this.
It helps take your mind off the reality which is that we are all walking our individual planks, blindfolded, and none of us knows how long the plank is.
So, Happy Birthday to me and may there be many more of them. Leave it at that.
One does feel that it is some sort of achievement in having been around for 75 years. I get pleasure out of remembering things that don’t happen any more, things that seem rather sweet now. A little boy who had achieved something, like winning a race or answering a question correctly at school would fold the fingers of his hand onto the palm, then exhale noisily onto his fingernails with a Huh and then polish the lapel of his jacket with those fingernails. He would say, ‘Chesty Me!’ and that was his achievement established. Village fetes (never with the circumflex accent on the first ‘e’) held running races for children (and sack and egg-and-spoon races for the non-sporty kids) and there were cash prizes. There were always cash prizes. Plenty of opportunities for a lad who could run to do the Chesty Me routine before he went up to collect his half-a-crown.
Another thing I remember is the Polyfoto studio. Every reasonably large town had one. You sat in the studio and 48 different pictures were taken of you by a special camera. You were told when to change your expression and a few days later you called in and there were 48 pictures of you on one sheet. The idea was that you, or your parents, would pick some of them and have them enlarged. But this had been my idea paid for with the US dollar sent by my Uncle Sam for Christmas that became 5 shillings when exchanged at the bank and that didn’t run to enlargements. 5 shillings was the price for your sheet of shots. I have scanned what I have left of my sheet and include it here. I was nine years old, I guess. Sweet memories.
Enough.
So, maybe this morning, when I’m having coffee I’ll think about this achievement of mine and quietly rub the back of my righthand finger nails on the right hand part of my shirt (where my lapel would have been) and say to myself, ‘Chesty Me’.
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