There must have been a mistake. I cannot possibly be as old as apparently I am. I stride about, walk for miles, run for buses, cook lovely food, write blogs, do all the paperwork for two pubs, a supermarket in Sheffield, an Oscar winning animator and accounts for a company that will do the signposting at the Olympics. I have just completed a novel and I perform poetry in public to modest acclaim. I cannot be more than 38, in my prime. Though when did I have time to produce all these offspring and descendants?
Sometimes it is fantastic to be as old as I really am, like last Thursday in the pub talking to two other men who were evacuated at the age of 5 or 6 and transported to an alien agricultural world of horse drawn wagons and threshing machines and rabbit stew and no inside toilets. It can be fantastic to be 76.
I have (1) done a consultancy job and (2) attended a meeting in Peterborough. (1) was profitable. (2) was duty but accompanied by and followed by wine, so acceptable. I am now on a train at 10 o'clock at night, speeding through the landscape, passing the amber lights of small towns, factories, dark fields flashing by. Nobody in the whole world knows where I am, whether I'll die or live, not my lovely wife, my 3 children, my 6 grandchildren, my 57 cousins, my many friends. I am alone in the Universe.
As you pass the signposts of life, 30, 40, 50, 60, 65 (when you're supposed to retire) 70, 75 and still alive, and kicking, you realise you have a diminishing number of years left, you start to savour every minute of every situation. So I enjoy being on this train at night. Brilliant. My grandaughter's friend Tilly Cat would say kewl. She tells me that's how you spell it now.
We sit in metal boxes, planes, buses, trains, tubes, all of them inclined to crash, be destryed, fail to land properly. Why do we do it? Why do we risk the possibilty of fire and death just to be somewhere else as soon as possible? Well I don't so much these days. I walk and look quietly at rivers.
But tonight, off the train, on to tube, then bus, all dangerous boxes, but all whizzing me delightfully about. Walked past St Andrew's Church. Notice for Over 60's Club, every Thursday. What do they do? Coffee, bingo, pet stroking? I'd go mad if I had tp spend every Thursday with people my own age. Almost nobody I spend time with is older than me, with a couple of exceptions and I don't care how old they are. They are young at heart. A young man with a clipboard in Villiers Street off The Strand asked me would I like to donate to Help the Aged. Sorry I said, I am the aged, can you help?
Tomorrow I shall catch another tin box which might or might not crash on its way to Peterborough or back to attend the grand reunion of the family of the Kings School Peterborough which I attended more than fifty years ago, so probably everybody there will be younger than me, but that will not matter at all. But I may possibly sup some stuff and reminisce. The Brewery Tap, Peterborough. December 27th. 7.30. See you there.
I'll try and be back in my truckle bed in London by midnight.
