A survival guide, and more, for 50-somethings
Just eight days of not drinking reset my life and thinking
I WAS GOING TO WRITE about having a month off alcohol but, in the end, I only managed eight days.
Eight days! Most of us have had longer holidays than that, so it wasn’t exactly a life-altering change, was it?
Perhaps I’ll call it a holiday from drinking, instead? A sobriety mini-break?
Continue reading “My Sobriety Mini-Break”Just when I was about to give up on Happy, along comes a radical new treatment for depression
I COULD BE A POSTER BOY for the term Treatment Resistant Depression.
When I was 21, and first saw a psychotherapist, I had the rather sweet and naïve belief that I would get ‘better’ soon.
And by ‘better’, I guess I meant happier – with myself, with my relationships, with my past, present and future.
Now I’m 55, I’m content with many aspects of life – I married a woman with a heart of gold, and have got just a bit wiser over the years – but I haven’t left my depression behind.
Just the other week, I was trying to get to grips with feeling down again, and decided to do some journaling.
I found myself drawing a bubble with the words ‘Hate Myself’ in the middle of the page, and 11 – eleven! – arrows radiating around it, detailing exactly what I disliked about me.
So, no, I wouldn’t say I was as happy as I’d hoped to be at 21.
Continue reading “Make Room for the ‘shrooms!”Why should we exercise? Because we want to, or because we’re told to?
WHEN I SET OFF on my last run, I got an instant reminder of why I exercise.
I’d been feeling stressed but, once I’d gone a hundred metres, I just couldn’t hold the tensions in any more.
The work my arms and legs were doing forced my lungs to take in deep, long, breaths – instead of the jittery little swallows of air I’d been subsisting on all day.
Once I gave in, and stopped fighting to control my breathing, I felt my worries float away.
I felt free – but am I, really?
Continue reading “Working (out) for The Man”From feeling like a Baked Alaska to touching crisp, sun-warmed towels, this is the time of year I love most
IT BLOODY SNOWED here on Monday. But, overall, the signs are that Spring is getting 2021 in a headlock at last.
Yesterday, I was out running in warm sunshine, wearing my shorts – alternately horrifying and dazzling passers-by as bright light bounced back off my veiny old white legs.*
Afterwards, I walked up to our allotment and watered for the first time this year.
My wife’s been working on the plot for months as an escape from lockdown, and it’s looking in particularly fine fettle as a result.
We look like getting a bumper crop of strawberries, while the patches containing onions, garlic and raspberries are all weeded, composted and ready to grow. Purple Sprouting Broccoli is already… um, sprouting. Wildly.
At home, Her Indoors is already potting and hardening off** the next tranche of plants – summery crops, ready to go into the ground when it warms up a bit more. Greedily, I gaze at these infant leeks, tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and artichokes, and their promise of eagerly-anticipated High Summer.
Gardening is a show of faith that there will be something to look forward to”
One of the great psychological benefits of gardening, of growing things, is that it’s a kind of pact with the future. What I mean is, planning a garden – leaving stuff in the ground, and trusting it to grow – is a show of faith that there will be something to look forward to further down the line, which in turn makes you want to be there to see and taste it.
Continue reading “This is it!”Why is an outbreak of spots threatening to ruin my whole life?
MY FACE HAS BEEN A MESS for a year now.
For a long time, I’ve been getting what I call ‘sweat spots’, which seem to flare up every time I exercise.
I’m the world’s sweatiest man, and having a face regularly covered in dirt and salt for hours is probably not the world’s greatest skincare regimen.
But the spots got much worse around the time of Lockdown 1: nowadays, the left-hand side of my Boat Race is in a state of almost constant eruption, and I’m sporting the sort of crags and scabs that went out of fashion when they finished Mount Rushmore.
I don’t think it’s lockdown-related, but being in lockdown means I haven’t wanted to bother my doctor too much. Not with – you know – everything else that’s going on.
About six months ago, I did get fed up enough to send the surgery a picture of the damage, from which my GP diagnosed shingles, and prescribed me antibiotics.
These worked for about a week, but then the red, rashy, sore-y, scabby stuff roared back with a vengeance, and took up almost permanent residence on my upper left cheek and nose.
And so, I’m back to Square One. I had terrible spots when I was a teenager, and I thought I’d more than done my fair share of wearing a Pizza Face.
But what makes it worse is that, at the age of 55, I don’t even have nice hair and a flat stomach to make up for it. Fucked off is not the word(s).
Continue reading “A New Complexion On 50-Something”We’ve been at home, oscillating between hope and fear, for a year. But we still don’t know if the world will emerge from Covid-19 a better place.
THERE’S A GUY I KNOW, once sort of a friend, who then grew really to dislike me.
It wasn’t as if I loved him, either: he was a call-a-spade-a-spade sort of person, and could be blunt and insensitive. But it still hurt me when – abruptly – he decided that I was a wrong ’un.
A few years ago, I heard that the same bloke had suffered a serious – and surprising – bout of depression. Word had it that he’d been signed off work for weeks after telling his doctor: “I just can’t get out of bed.”
Having suffered with the condition for much of my life, I’d never have wished depression upon him, however much we disliked one another.
But, at the same time, I wanted him to learn something from it.
Now he knew what depression was like, maybe he’d be a bit humbler? Perhaps a little more understanding about what people like me went through?
In other words, I hoped he’d come out of his dark place somehow better.
But it never happened: this bloke recovered, he went back to work and normal life, and the next time I bumped into him, he was spectacularly hurtful and rude. In other words, just the same boorish prick he’d always been.
So why am I telling this story? Because, when I think about the post-Covid world, I worry that it’ll be like my former friend after his ordeal: just the same…
Continue reading “One Year, One Place, Two Minds”After a year ruined by Covid, nature can restore my faith in better times
THIS WEEK, THE UK marked a year of living with Covid-19, and I marked it by having a wobble.
I mean, it’s hardly an anniversary to celebrate, is it? One hundred and twenty-six thousand dead. Fear and uncertainty still rife, and the prospect of spending still more months in limbo, home alone.
Back in the day, the four of us went out to Clap For Carers every Thursday, but on Tuesday no-one felt much like standing on our doorstep, ‘reflecting’ on a terrible year and shining a frigging light.
To be frank, we don’t want any more gestures: we just want it all to be over.
Continue reading “Hard Times, Soft Fascinations”Are you stressed out about going back to normal, post lockdown? Let’s think of some positives…
I SLEPT REALLY LATE today.
By the time I woke up, the kids were just starting to trickle into the school down our road, and I felt guilty that the teachers were already at work while I was still in my PJs.
But then I told myself that I shouldn’t be feeling that way, because being able to sleep more has been one of the major pluses of my pandemic.
If you’re a currently-working-from-home type, not having to get up in the dark and commute, and having more control of your life and routines, has been a real boon – even if there’s a worrying lack of actual work for me out there, due to the same pandemic.
As a writer, it’s been pleasant to think up interview questions in bed, have ideas while you do your stretching exercises – although you tend to lose count of how many you’ve done – and write articles in your Piggy Jimjams, as I’m doing right now.*
And, anyway, we’ll all have to get our heads around returning to normal soon, so we might as well enjoy it while we can.
Continue reading “Life After Covid – Like Adding Just A Pinch Of Spice”Struggling for fitness, I’m appreciating – not patronising – newbie runners
AS A NON-CLUB RUNNER who trains mainly alone, I’ve never felt we runners were that friendly towards one other.
Maybe it’s just a London thing, and people are different elsewhere…
But city pavement-bashers find it hard to break the habit of always blanking strangers and treating them with suspicion – even when we’re dressed in the same running gear, and united in suffering.
Come to think of it, maybe it’s the suffering that does it? Perhaps we’re not being bad mannered intentionally, it’s just that we’re all in our own little worlds of pain, which even other runners don’t really come into.
A while ago, I read an article that compared runners to a kind of secular priesthood – think the shared sense of vocation and dedication; the urge towards purity and transcendence, even the uniform.
But the piece struck one bum note when it described how runners supposedly greet each other as they pass, by raising an arm like a priest in benediction, and I thought: “I’ve never seen that happen.”
Continue reading “Kudos to the Couch To 5k Brigade!”Here’s a quick rant about the sheer drudgery of staying on an even keel
I SOMETIMES WISH that I had a quid – or even a penny – for every hour I’ve spent working on my bloody mental health.
I feel like the Fast Show character – “Mental ’ealth? 30 years, man and boy, I done it! Hardest Game in The World, that is!” – when I think of all the time I’ve lost to shoring up my mood.
I’m thinking about all the runs and rides I made myself do, so I’d feel better…. the hours and days reading self-help books and articles…. the journaling and unsent letters to people who’d hurt me…. the years and years in therapy.
Continue reading “Mental Health? Hardest Game In The World”