Help – the aged

I’m getting old. I’ve decided that there’s a distinct difference between being old and getting old. While most people will acknowledge that they’re getting old, hardly anyone will admit that they actually are old.

I don’t particularly feel very old, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Although to be fair I did just go downstairs to get something and not only did I forget why I went down there, I realised shortly after that I hadn’t even intended to go downstairs in the first place. I do know some people who are objectively quite old, even if they’re not quite ready to admit it either. Which leads me to believe that no one actually feels their age inside their head.

What is the mid-life crisis if not the panicked realisation that your body is aging faster than you thought it would? I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ve long reached my physical peak and that it’s basically downhill from here. But then I like going downhill, it’s much easier than going uphill. Much faster in a wheelchair, too.

On recycling and cats

What bin is a dead mouse supposed to go in? Asking for me, not a friend. Just one of the many perplexing questions you find yourself asking once you’ve added a petulant fluffy tyrant to the household mix. One that woke me up early this morning and then spent the next half an hour loudly explaining that it was time for her breakfast, until it was time for her breakfast.

The waking up early is something of an issue between the two of us – I like to sleep in the morning, see. I’ve no particular desire to wake up early and stalk the house, and usually our conflicting morning strategies exist in a sort of quiet but simmering tension. Which is to say that I wake up to the cat staring at me to see if I’m awake. I can’t say how long she sits there for – I’ve tried teaching her the time (‘when the big paw reaches the 12, and the little paw reaches the 7…’) but all that means is that she now sits meaningfully in front of the kitchen clock as if she’s seeing something I’m missing.

The mouse was a present, so you have to at least show some appreciation. Even if most of its head was missing – seems a bit rude to start eating a present before you give it to someone. I tend to double bag them in the little gently scented nappy sacks we use for clearing the litter tray (how did these animals ever survive in the wild? The vet told me recently I’m supposed to be brushing her teeth, too) and then I pop the lot in the general bin, taking whatever bag is on the go and slinging it outside. But should a mouse go in the food waste? I’m sure there are enough rodents scurrying around on whatever discreet landfill this stuff is going to without adding to the problem. And this tiny, slightly chewed carcass is the definition of food waste. Sometimes I’m just too hand-wringingly middle class for my own good.

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Hello there. It’s really the height of bad manners to start a little blog and then to leave it empty, isn’t it? It might be almost February, but allow me to be so louche at this late point in proceedings as to wish you a happy new year.

It was a bad start – on my first day back to work I fell down the stairs, forgot to put a belt on my trousers and left my office pass on the dining table. But it can only improve from there, right? I feel the same about the weather. It’s important to start January as the calendar ticks over with gloomy nights and endlessly inclement weather, because at least the good times lie ahead.

Or at least I hope they do. Sometimes I feel like I have already crested life’s rollercoaster and begun plunging towards my eventual demise. It’s all looking down from here. I have no resolutions in this year of our Lord two thousand and twenty three, because allow me my bad habits and harmless petty indulgences in this short time I have left. Melodramatic maybe, but I can easily start to understand how a mid-life crisis germinates and takes hold. It all makes me want to get a motorbike, only I’m too much of a coward and I’d probably fall off it.

On presents, and the scenic route

We’ve been married for almost five and a half years now, but I only found out this week that my wife thinks nothing of opening a present before Christmas. Evidently there is some sort of tiered system, depending on the provenance of the gift and whether it will fit in her bag on our way to stay with her family in France. Opening them after Christmas doesn’t even factor into the list of options.

I, on the other hand, have been raised to stare at all of my presents until the morning of the 25th, at which point they can be revealed in whatever glory they possess at my age. At some point late in childhood we were able to convince our parents that it was traditional somewhere in the world to open one present before you go to bed on Christmas Eve.

Despite the age old cliche, I was this week forced to buy myself some new socks – I just don’t have a reliable supply of them guaranteed at this time of year. Although perhaps if I opened all my presents early like certain people I’d have more clarity on the situation. It’s better this way, really, I’m quite particular about what I’ll put on my feet. Socks are simply not the place to make a statement.

I write all this from the back of a car, which isn’t somewhere I find myself very often I must admit. I’m spotting things on the M25 that I’ve never seen before – mostly trees and some interesting animals (horses). I have seen horses before, and trees of course, but I’ve never had the opportunity to appreciate the scenic qualities of the capital’s orbital road. It’s one of the great paradoxes of the motorway, I feel – everything looks beautiful from its concreted vantage point, but if you were to explore the picturesque areas you’d find them blighted by the ugliness of the major through route. It’s all about perspective, isn’t it. Like the fact that Laura hasn’t even had the chance to open her main present from me because it hasn’t arrived on time. In her face.

Let it snow

People in the UK seem to go absolutely gaga for a bit of snow, it’s quite incredible. Driving down the street as the first flakes fell on Sunday evening people were emerging from their homes and standing on the pavements with their faces to the sky and mouths hanging open. Really, you don’t know where that stuff has been.

And as the population loses its mind the same happens to our infrastructure. The roads and the trains seem to be taken by surprise every time, as if checking the weather forecast is for wimps. Given the regularity with which winter happens each year, on a broadly similar timetable, what’s most surprising is that we can still be surprised.

It all makes you worry about what would happen were something genuinely unexpected to happen. Civilisation is suspended on such a fine thread, it really wouldn’t take a great deal for the whole thing to come crashing down. A run on flour at the supermarket, for instance.

It’s all doubly ironic – especially in these days of weaponised nostalgia – that the country which prides itself on its indomitable Blitz spirit can be brought to its knees by 5cm snow drifts. It always reminds me of that mythical excuse someone apparently once sent to their insurer, that a tree just came out of nowhere. Snow? We couldn’t see anything, our view was impeded by the weather.

What’s most annoying about the trains being cancelled – a combination of weather and strikes – is that I was hoping to be in the office for no other reason than to have someone else pay to warm me. On the plus side the coffee is better at home. Got to look on the bright side and all that.

Making a murderer

They say that we’ve all got a murderer inside us. And also a novel. And also possibly several spiders a year that crawl into our mouths while we sleep. I’m starting to feel like the old woman who swallowed a fly. Perhaps the Grimm version finishes with her swallowing Harold Shipman, who wriggles and jiggles and wiggles inside her before surreptitiously administering a lethal dose of pethidine.

I’m not sure about all of that. At least I wasn’t this morning, but now I’m starting to think it might have some merit. You see, I’ve been driving Audi’s glorious RS3 about the place (see below). Not in that particularly obnoxious shade of green, but in a marginally more tasteful white that shows up road grime beautifully. Driving it because I drive cars for work and write about them, I must hasten to add, not because I’ve bought one and wish to show off my credentials as a pilot of the highest order.

Normally I drive an electric car (the one that I don’t have to write about for work, the one that takes me to the shops and does all the boring things), because I’m too old and too sensible to glue myself to a piece of prominent tarmac but still wish to virtue signal my efforts to improve the planet. But what I particularly like about driving an electric car is how it makes you a better driver.

Not better in the harder, faster, stronger sense you Daft Punk, but in the way it forces to you be strategic on the move, plan well ahead and take it easy in order to eke out as many miles as you can before you’re forced off the road to find a plug that the app on your phone is trying to gaslight you into thinking is precisely where you’re standing.

Driving a fast Audi turns you into an absolute arse. I’m sorry to have to admit that all those people who offend us on the roads simply can’t help it, it’s a condition that comes over you as soon as you get behind the wheel and fire up the engine. I was on the motorway earlier and I even – I’m loathe to admit this on a public platform – flashed my lights at someone who was dawdling in the outside lane. We might not have a murderer lurking beneath the skin, but the inner twat is 30 seconds and a premium German performance car away. Consider yourself warned.

When blogs used to be cool

Blogs used to be all the rage. I had one back in 2006 when they were cool. We used to meet up in shifty looking abandoned warehouses in East London with the drinks sponsored by tech companies that would barely make it to an age old enough to start looking for nurseries. These shindigs were mostly populated by odd misfits such as myself and esteemed journalists and communication specialists who already knew each other. It was a very social media.

I would write all sorts of terrible things on my blog, just farting my thoughts onto the screen without any thought for the consequence or consideration that anyone would be reading. Mostly no one did, in fact. Occasionally I got myself in trouble. But it was useful to go through all of that before it became a bigger issue in the age of Twitter – I’m just the sort of person who would make an ill-advised joke and jump on a plane while it rattled about the fibre cables of the world gathering a massively increasing ball of misinterpretation behind it.

Somehow we’ve come full circle from those heady days of exploring the expanding opportunities of the information superhighway. When I first had a website people called it the ‘world wide web’ and they gave out URLs on the telly with a miasma of colons and forward slashes that hip young things would act out, like a sort of techy macarena. And now blogs are socially acceptable again. So I’m writing one. Hello.