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”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”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!”Feeling low? Just try doing something different…
I HAVEN’T WRITTEN MUCH lately, because I’ve been pretty down.
As a writer in his mid-50s who worries constantly about his work, I often think of myself as useless. And, of course, that’s not good for productivity.
I’m not the only one struggling to cope with the world as it is at present, but lately I’ve been feeling particularly past it, unfit and old.
I was also finding it hard to imagine an enjoyable future, and so it wasn’t long before some familiar thoughts popped into my head.
“What if I killed myself?” I wondered. “Surely they’d be better off without me?”
And that was the point I realised I had to do something.
Continue reading “The Purpose of Having a Purpose”I’m increasingly risk-averse these days – is it just another sign of ageing?
THERE’S STILL A LITTLE bit of snow lying around here, left over from the flurry at the weekend.
Today, I was thinking about going to the shops on my bike, but I didn’t fancy it: I was a bit worried about hitting a frozen patch, and tumbling off.
I haven’t been running for a while, either – partly because of the still-icy pavements and the possibility of a slip, followed by yet another muscle tear or strain.
And while I was thinking all this, I asked myself: “When did you become such an old man? What happened to all that testosterone?”
Continue reading “You Are Now Entering A Testosterone Free Zone”My knees and hips are also furious about my new exercise regime
OF COURSE I’m on a health kick at the moment.
It’s January, season of new starts. And anyway, what else is there to do these days if you’re not a sainted Key Worker?
From what I can work out, everybody else’s motivation and productivity seem to have fallen off a cliff while we mooch around at home, waiting for our distant vaccinations and the post-Covid New Dawn.
Despite this (and as if there wasn’t enough for us to be down about already) many of us still feel we should be achieving something with all this lockdown downtime.
So I’ve decided to try and turn back the clock, yet again, to when I was thin and thirty-ish.
Continue reading “Thighs Don’t Lie”I never dreamed older people would try to overthrow The State in their spare time – until I saw pictures from The Capitol
WHEN I STARTED writing this blog, I wondered what the future might hold for me and other 50-somethings.
I thought – correctly as it turned out – that I’d be writing mostly about dodgy knees, grey pubes, baldness, and binge drinking.
But, until I saw the pictures from The Capitol, I never thought about us rioting.
Continue reading “Rioting And The Over-50s”A first run for six weeks has inspired a happy flurry of similes!
MY BODY SAID ‘Yes’, but my mind said ‘No’.
My body said ‘Yes’, but my mind said ‘No’.
My body said ‘Yes’, but my mind said ‘No’.
But, in the end, my body won – I was going to try running for the first time since I crocked my knee in October.
Continue reading “Running Like A Mouth Full Of Cotton Wool”If you’re feeling blue, you could do worse than get on a bike
I FELT that I had to cycle yesterday morning: even though I was tired from riding the day before, and my bad knee was sore. Even though it was 9.30am on Monday and I ought to be working.
I was feeling moderately bad, mentally. The excitement of my birthday week and the weekend that followed it had dissipated and left me with a bad case of the Monday blues.
There’s something about the mess of a Monday – Sunday’s unwashed dishes, the pile of washing in the basket, unread emails piling up in my inbox all weekend – that unmans me, and makes me want to run away from my life.
I caught myself ruminating that maybe now that I’d reached 55, I should stop there and end it all because I’d reached the end of my usefulness. I thought about how my brother and I don’t talk and how it was probably my fault…
Then, just after I set off, I saw a pensioner and told myself: “You live like a pensioner. You don’t have the energy or the discipline to live a full life. All you’re fit for is staying at home and pottering around until you die.”
As I said, I wasn’t having a great day. But the longer I cycled, the more forgiving of myself I became.
Continue reading “Give Us Hills, Not Pills”As I approach a dreaded birthday in lockdown, my bike has become my only solace
I’m turning 55 this week, which seems like a terrible birthday.
In marketing terms, I’ll no longer belong in the company of anyone who’s still in their early 50s, and I’m dead to hip young 45-year-olds.
Also according to the people who sell us things, I’m now likely to think, buy and do the same stuff as someone who’s 64.
By my own reckoning, turning 55 means that I truly am moving from middle age to old age – but without the wisdom and perspective to appreciate getting older.
Continue reading “Riding It Out”
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