KEY POINTS:
The word "middle" is not my favourite at the moment. Not by a long shot. And when you place the word "aged" right after it, it goes down even further in my estimation.
Maybe it's the onset of winter but I definitely feel all of my 40-something
years right now. The mysterious aches and pains, as well as the less mysterious aches and pains that tell me I should take better care of myself in social situations; they're all there right at this moment.
And as for global warming, well if everything is getting warmer, how come it feels just that little bit colder every morning when I grump and groan as I get out of bed?
Ageing is an inevitability, I know that. Except if you're Richard Branson, who seems to have done some kind of deal with the devil. But for the rest of us mere mortals it is a fact of life. But this still doesn't make it fair.
It is a much-less-than-momentous day for a middle-aged man when he first hears his barber/hairdresser intone the words, "And shall we trim up the ear hair?" This is not because the answer is blindingly obvious - "Of course, we shall, what did you think I was planning to do with it?
Grow it in the shape of a topiary giraffe?" - but because of the shock news that you have ear hair. What is it with hair that it seems to migrate around the ageing body, almost at will?
It departs from where it is kind of useful and sometimes even aesthetically pleasing (i.e, on top of the head) in favour of popping up where it does no one any favours and seems to have little or no use - like the ears.
What grand design requires that at a certain point in one's life you need to grow ear hair? How can ear hair be of any use to anyone? Does it muffle certain frequencies that would cause our aged ears harm? Do our ears need more protection from the cold as we rock 'n' roll towards our dotage? But hairy ears are, in the great catalogue of things that suck about middle age, nothing compared to the unfair losses that occur in the eyesight department.
I have reading glasses now - and have done for a few years - and every time I go for an eye test and remark how crap my eyesight has quickly become, the optometrist smiles knowingly in that way that people who know a lot tend to do and says "just you wait 'til next year". Dear Lord, the unfairness of it all.
And, unfortunately, the accuracy of it all, as I have found lately that I am losing my glasses much more often than I used to. This isn't so bad - I lose stuff all the time - except for the fact that, increasingly, I need my glasses to see where I might have lost my glasses. It is the Cycle of Shortsightedness.
The solution, I feel, is to have another pair of glasses just for finding my glasses. Of course, when I do lose my glasses I will have forgotten where I put my glasses-hunting glasses, thus rendering them even worse than useless and adding to the number of things I need to search for at a time when I can't see a damn thing. Or remember a damn thing, because memory is the most shocking of all the reality checks that a mid-life assessment brings. People's names, street names, upcoming events, rash promises made, they're all in there somewhere, but getting them out in the right order is increasingly hard work.
It's like the middle-aged human brain is a woman's handbag. All the stuff in the world goes in there and, remarkably, it all fits in, but getting stuff out when you need it in a hurry just never happens according to plan.
The search for the ringing cellphone leads to the rediscovery of the pen you couldn't find last time you looked, along with the house key you thought you'd lost ages ago - but somehow, the ringing phone manages to elude your grasp and may, indeed, have gone to a part of the bag as-yet-unexplored by humans.
And that's it really. If there was a point here other than to have a bit of a grump about the unfairness of the universe, well, I've forgotten what it was. Not that it matters, because I can't find my glasses to see what I'm typing.
And if you're going to have a go at me about it, it's not like I can hear what you're saying because I apparently have a rain forest sprouting in my ears. And not that it would matter if I could hear you anyway, because I'd only forget about that too.
It's cold. I might go back to bed now.
