Mid Life Crisis?

November, 2004 :

What the hell am I doing?

I’ve mentioned many times that I’ve been working for over thirty years, I know I’ve told you, you heard me didn’t you?, thirty bloody years. If I turn that on it’s head I’ll be seventy-seven years old, seventy-bloody-seven.

Hey, I’m not allowed that many am I?

Well, my dad wasn’t and my mum wasn’t. His mum and dad lived into their early eighties and her ma and pa were fifty-four and eighty-one respectively. Using my incredible mathematical skills I average it all out at seventy-three years for the six of them.

Three score years and ten, that’s what we’re allowed, I read that somewhere…..

So, alright, back to me, and it is about me you understand, you may be a reader (if you actually exist) but it’s me, me, me, not you, me. So, maybe I’ll squeak out my seventy-three years, which gives me about twenty-six left, twenty-bloody-six years. What was I doing twenty-bloody-six years ago?

I was twenty-one.

Well, that helps me a lot, twenty-one, I can remember that vaguely and not as though it was yesterday, it seems like a bloody age ago to tell you the truth, seems like a thousand years ago in some ways, I certainly wasn’t me back then, I was something, but it wasn’t me. It seems that the older I am, the less I know.

Well, perhaps twenty-six years left for the clock to run isn’t that bad, perhaps at the end of that time I’ll look back and find today’s version of me quite unrecognizable and far more cleverer than the endgame version, and to try to answer my original question about what the hell am I doing, I’ve decided that I’m just in the middle of my last half century and if things go according to the same plan as the first half then, by the end of the second half I’m sure to know absolutely nothing.

And on the other hand, because statistics can’t be trusted, that piano may just drop on me tomorrow.