somebody spoke and I went into a dream....

When I was growing up, my brothers and I used to laugh at the way my dad would fall asleep in front of the telly every night.  He would get in from work, have a family dinner around the table in the dining room and he would then grab the newspaper and sit down on the sofa in the living room.   Almost without fail, he would be asleep within ten minutes, often starting to snore not long after that.  The snoring disturbed our TV viewing, of course, so we would start coughing loudly at each other or making unsubtle banging noises to try and get him to stop.  He'd wake up with a start, scrunch up the newspaper involuntarily in his lap, and would then grumpily cast about him trying to get his bearings.

It was hysterically funny.

I used to wonder how you could fall asleep like that before it was even nine in the evening.

Well, I'm not wondering any more.

I'm pretty sure it's getting worse as I get older too: I used to only fall asleep in front of Match of the Day on a Saturday night, and I could rationalise that it was usually after a big meal and a couple of drinks... but now I seem to feel the need for a little snooze almost as soon as I get home from work of an evening.

Recently, I seem to be prone to a catastrophic dip in energy at around 3pm every afternoon.  At home, this isn't too much of a problem.  You can just have a nap, right?  But when you're in the office?  Hmm.  I can usually handle this if I'm in a position to get up, walk around and make myself a cup of coffee.... but if I'm trapped at the back end of a meeting room furthest away from the door, stuck in a session with some suppliers or something, then it's pretty awful.

My eyelids start to droop, and soon enough every fibre of my being is trying to stop myself from falling asleep completely.  I no longer care what anyone in the room is saying - if I even cared before - my entire focus is on making sure that I don't nod off.  I'm pretty sure that falling asleep at work in a meeting with suppliers is not likely to be too career enhancing... even by the standards of my brilliant career, that might be a bridge too far and as I seem to be drifting off like this more and more often, it's probably only a matter of time before it happens and I do fall properly asleep in the middle of a meeting.

Maybe it's because of my MS.  Maybe I'm eating the wrong kind of food at lunchtime.  Maybe it's because I'm flogging myself too hard with all that running I'm doing.  Hell, maybe it's just because I attend an awful lot of really, really boring meetings.

Maybe it's all of those things.

Unfortunately, I'm also reluctantly facing up to the fact that it's simply because I'm old.  Laugh it up though kids; just as I laughed at my dad when he nodded off back in the day (well, and he still does, to be fair), and just as you're now laughing at me.....one day someone is going to be laughing at you dribbling onto your cardigan as you snooze gently in the corner.

There are no more indignities that come with age, right?

Right?

cry me a river...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but I cried in the cinema when I went to go and watch “Cool Runnings”. I’m not especially ashamed of this fact, but I do have an explanation: it was the end of a long run of heart-wrenching films that I went to see at the cinema over a number of weeks. Schindler’s List, Philadelphia, The Remains of the Day, Shadowlands…. By the end of that lot, I think I would have cried at pretty much anything. I used to cry at the drop of a hat as a child - real tears too, not the crocodile sort - but somewhere along the line, my emotions dried up. Nothing to do with being sent to attend largely single-sex boarding schools between the ages of seven and eighteen, I’m sure…..

Perhaps it’s because I’m older, but I seem to be turning into something of a sap and my eyes seem to fill with tears pretty much at the drop of a hat, no matter how obviously my emotions are being manipulated. This is easy enough to conceal in the dark of the matinee, and I think I got away with it at the end of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” the other night, but harder when it’s broad daylight and we’re watching the telly.

The most recent culprit was when the Keira Knightley version of “Pride and Prejudice” was on the telly before New Year. Now, I’ve not been much of a fan of Matthew Macfadyen since his days on Spooks, a show that I loathed, but I found myself quite affected by his performance as Darcy and the way that he and Elizabeth slowly come to terms with the way they feel about each other. I can take or leave Austen, in the main, and find her relentlessly over-analysed by people trying to project readings onto her work that I just don’t think they can support, but you can’t argue with P&P (and Keira Knightley made a much better, far less smug and knowing Elizabeth than Jennifer Ehle in the celebrated BBC adaptation too).

Getting a bit of a lump in my throat watching Macfayden as Darcy was bad enough, but what really had me wiping my eyes was Donald Sutherland’s Mr. Bennett. I firmly believe that Austen’s Mr. Bennett is one of the greatest creations in literature, and Sutherland played him beautifully, particularly at the end when he realises that his Lizzy really does love that man that she apparently professed to dislike. He says at one point, with his eyes filling with tears, “We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him”, and that was it, I was in pieces.

This emergence of a soft, sentimental old fool is somewhat at odds with the image I like to portray of myself as a cold, logical iceman.

[ahem].

Another reason to never watch ET, anyway.

you can knit a sweater by the fireside....

I was in Oxford at the weekend.

As usual, on Saturday morning, I went for a run with my friend Rich.  Rich is a touch older than me, and usually runs at a slightly slower pace than I would normally do.  This is never a problem, but as it was the morning after the night before, I was more than usually happy to tootle along gently for five miles, enjoying the beautiful morning and slowly blowing the cobwebs away.

Oxford is a nice place to go for a run, with the University Parks providing a lovely setting for a saunter around some beautiful lakes and playing fields.

It is, of course, also filled with students exercising.

This wouldn't normally be a problem, except that they are usually all at least half our age, and as they fly past us like gazelles as we huff and puff around the grounds, it's hard not to feel slightly resentful of them.  There is some consolation to be had in the lycra clad bodies as they zoom past, I suppose... but not that much.

Apart from anything else, these students aren't very friendly.  There's an unwritten rule amongst runners that we're all in this together: it doesn't matter what shape you're in or how fast you're running, it is your responsibility to acknowledge your fellow runners.  It doesn't have to be much: a smile, a cheery hello, or even a look of shared pain.... but it should be done.  The students don't follow this rule, and it's very dispiriting to give someone a friendly smile only to be completely ignored*

* Rich tells me that one young blonde thing we ran past was very quick to give me a quick warm smile - both times we ran past her as we each completed a circuit of the Parks running in opposite directions - but if that's true, I was oblivious to her attentions.  Honestly.

The last mile or so back to Rich's house consists of the long drag back up Headington Hill.  This is one of those hills that is steep enough that buses and lorries can't climb it when it snows, and after four miles and a skin full of wine the night before, it was a bit of a struggle for us too.  As we hauled our way uphill, we were passed by a young lady powering her way downhill.  She was probably only in her early 20s, if that, but she looked like she meant business and had a very focused look about her.  She managed to break her concentration for just long enough to give the pair of us a withering, appraising sideways glance as she swept past us, freezing our warm smiles even as they left our lips.

We turned to each other as we continued our pitifully slow progress towards the distant summit of the hill:

"Pah.  Anyone can look good running DOWN the hill.  She should wait until she's got another twenty years on the clock...."
"Yeah, and she should try it on your knees...."

etc.

We're so old.

As WB Yeats almost said:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
You try running up that bloody hill with a hangover. 

Envying the young for their youth is an especially futile exercise, no?

like a coin that won't get tossed....

Today I reach the grand old age of 37.

To celebrate, I got up, made a pack lunch that included a cheese roll, a tuna roll, some carrots and a pack of Frazzles and I went to work. Later on, I plan to have my tea in front of the telly and to read my book. It's just another day.

....well, to be fair, it's not been just another day: to mark the occasion, C. baked me a bunch of cakes to take into the office to share with my colleagues (sour cherry and chesnut brownies, pear and ginger muffins and a Viennese poppy seed cake - all delicious, obviously). And after I've had my tea, I'm going to go out for birthday drinks with some dear friends.... so perhaps not quite like every other day, but still reasonably sedate.

Frankly, that's just the way I like it.

I keep catching myself saying things that prove that I'm old. I genuinely do not understand the point of those saggy-arsed trousers that cause people to walk with a waddle and to show their pants. They ARE ridiculous, but every time I say as much, I'm acutely aware that I'm showing my age. Why on earth should a 37 year old man understand those trousers? I'm pretty sure that the only thing weirder than a 37 year old man "getting" those trousers would be a 37 year old man *wearing* those trousers....

Still, as Dylan Thomas said:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

...but as Thomas himself was said to have died of an "acute insult to the brain" after drinking 18 straight whiskies, I think it's fair to say that he practiced what he preached (he was only 39 at the time, mind, which hardly seems like the close of day to me...although perhaps in a couple of years, it will).

Why just accept ridiculous trousers? I could let them go with a shrug, but they are ridiculous and as long as I'm alive, it's worth saying as much.  Age has got nothing to do with it.

I remember, at some point in the 1980s, working out how old I was going to be in the year 2000 and being appalled at how OLD 26 was.

Ha!

I like Tom Baker's approach to ageing: "The older I get, the older old is".

37 is no age.  I'm not dead yet.