Monday 30 April 2018

I have a hurting knee!


It's 9:57pm and, oh my fucking god, not only am I sitting on the couch, I'm actually still dressed in my day clothes and not in my pyjamas!!! Possibly this means I will eventually be going to bed in these very same clothes and without taking off my makeup or brushing my teeth to boot. If this does come to pass, it will be because I had such a good time composing this actual post you're reading right now, writing it just for you, Yes, FOR YOU, that I didn't ever want the writing to end. So, either way - bouncing out of bed tomorrow clean-faced and cotton-pyjamaed, refreshed after a decent amount of sleep - or blearily waking up in same clothes I had on today, and if I'm completely honest, yesterday also, and sporting panda eyes and hell breath - don't be sad. Or at least, don't be any sadder than you would have been if I'd just not written anything and you'd been left to your own devices, whatever they are. I am not responsible for how you choose to react to my choices.

Interesting talk today with my doctor about being old. Didn't even scratch the surface of how I feel about ageing. I wondered if it's going to become our new topic that we hack away at for years on end. I don't feel very enthusiastic about it, and I think it would be particularly unfair if we had to move onto wrinkles, right knees that get sore in the cold, deteriorating eyesight, menopause and worst of all, white hair, before we have completely killed stone dead the current topic of my problems with men. I would really like there to be just the briefest interval compatible with decency in between getting that one sorted out and moving onto the next phase in my continuing adventures in overthought. 

White hair, for instance: look, I don't know if I'll ever be comfortable about mine. I don't know what it says to me, let alone what it says to other people. I can't even tell if it looks white like the hair of an incredibly ancient old crone, or if it looks blond like the hair of a senior member of the fraternity of the children of the corn. Is this dress white and gold or blue and black? I had this puzzlement before I let my own hair grow white: I used to wonder whether the hair of Julian Assange and the hair of Kevin Rudd was white or was it very very pale blond? You may imagine how unpleasant it is to feel that one shares even a single physical trait with those two men. 

 Just disregard the lamentable photobombing type behaviour going on in the middle there, if you can. I took the picture because I was very interested in the appearance of the nun sitting at the table behind us. You see that shirt she's wearing? That is basically the Holy Grail of Shirts as far as I'm concerned.  I am also wearing a stripy polo shirt buttoned right up to the top. So, I'm going to look like her soon. That's the trajectory. 

I took that picture in the cafe at the Museum where I had taken Leonard to see the Vikings exhibition (after spending the evening before teaching him all he needed to know about Vikings. There were many, many people inside the exhibition who looked like this man. Why?


Just to thank you for staying with me to this point 
 here is a picture of ...something.



  

4 comments:

jac said...

I would like you to know I saw the title of this post in my feed reader and thought, “I have a Hurting Foot” so you can’t imagine how delighted I was once I opened it. Also I knew what the Viking link was before it happened, mainly because I had googled it probably a month ago and showed it to a millennial coworker who thinks he knows the internet. HE DOES NOT. And I thought the nun had three hands at first glance. So 10/10 post, A+++, would read again.

JahTeh said...

I know about realizing I'm becoming old, put it down to awful arithmetic when I dropped a year somewhere and suddenly it hit me that this is the year when I turn 70 not next year. I thought I had a whole year to adjust but no, it hit me with a bang and I went on a down hill slide to not quite depression but a period of "ohGodhowinthehellwillIsurvivemovinginto71after70". This coincided with my Church of the Holy Hair Dye going bust. Dearest hairdresser went through every book of colour until we matched and some depression lifted but like snakes and ladders I went down when mother became determined to live to see me turn 70. At least my hair flames again and I can ignore the fat and wrinkles.

Fyodor said...

On the Blanche-Neige hair thing, I’ve noticed that it seems to be the cat’s meow amongst Teh Young People nowadays to dye one’s hair silver-grey. So, if one weren’t aware of your desperate struggle against the ravages of time an unknowing observer might easily assume your look to be [strike]that of a hipster wanker[/strike]* hip to au courant fashion rather than symptomatic of the universe’s inexorable desire to grind us back into cosmic dust.

On a more positive note, seeing your new hair colour post-Interregnum/Restoration did rather remind me of seeing Jennifer Ehle (who resembles you) for the first time in her natural blonde rather than the Lizzie Bennet dye-job – startling at first, but aesthetically better suited. IMO, anyhoo.

* No strikes allowed, apparently. Jaysus, Blogger, get with 2005, already.

lucy tartan said...

oh Jac that makes my week.

Thanks very much all three of you.x