This is a rant from Mike Raven over on http://thoggy.blogspot.co.uk/ where I guested yesterday. Do go over and have a look around. I can recommend his recipe for corned beef and piccalilli marsala.

~~~~

I like Duncan’s blog. And I wanted take this opportunity to rant. But I couldn’t think of anything suitable to rant about. I’m just too well-balanced, you see.

Plus, I have my own blog, and it is often difficult to think of good enough material to feature there, without sowing my seed (sorry about that) elsewhere.

And then, like the proverbial train or petroleum-powered automobile, it hit me.

What I really hate is getting older.

I am aware of my own mortality, which although sounds dark, I don’t believe is a bad thing. I am naturally quite self-conscious, when I’m trying to build up the courage to do a certain thing a useful argument I use on myself is “Well in sixty years I’ll be probably dead and I won’t care”.

But I innately hate the ageing process.

Yesterday it was my knee. The left one, to be precise – the right one is still going strong, but ever since I stood on a football several years ago (resulting in attendance at a physiotherapist’s office where you were left in a room with a machine that vibrated your knee vigorously) the left one hasn’t really been functioning as well as it should.

To be fair, my body is probably one of the oldest things I own. Except for my house that is, and a copy of “Hello Sailor” by Eric Idle. And because it’s getting older, it does stuff that I don’t like.

Why are my eyes increasingly only able to focus on objects close to my face? Okay, that one is my fault for playing on computers for far too long (I type this on a sunny summers day when I really should be outside, breathing in fresh air, or laughing, or doing something else equally irrelevant) but nevertheless why are far away things so fuzzy now?

On the plus side for ageing, I can finally grow a beard! This is wonderful news, which I am honestly quite pleased about. But there is quite a lot of grey (and even white) in it. Why does the body think grey is a valuable colour for hair? What evolutionary concept means that turning hair grey is beneficial? Why not purple, or green? Or keep the damn stuff the same colour it always was?

My dear partner likes to needle me by commenting that the hair on the top of my head is receding. Again, why does it need to retreat away from my face? What is the benefit of this? Is it because of the beard?  I’ll do without the beard if it means hair production can be focused again on the upper head region, where it has traditionally taken place.

I have other medical complaints (which I won’t go into for the fear of shocking and disgusting readers) and I’m starting to think that they won’t magically disappear and go away, rather that they are likely to remain with me for as long as I continue to function. At least until I am able to 3D-print out a new body for myself, I understand that a monetary sum in the region of just £210,000 has allowed scientific efforts to be focused on creating a 3D-printable burger so a body can’t be far away.

And yet ageing does have some benefits – with age seemingly comes assertiveness, and situations that, when younger, I would have tolerated without comment I now appear to be able to leap into and become involved, like a latter-day Winston Churchill. Just the other day when driving, someone cut me up at a junction and I beeped my horn at them and unleashed a vicious multiple-part hand gesture at them. Obviously I did wait until they had safely turned off onto a different road than the one I took, just in case they stopped and beat the living daylights out of me, but nevertheless I am becoming more and more assertive by the decade.

At any rate, ageing is annoying. But I concede that it’s probably better than the alternative.