Guitars and Life

The really observant of you all may have noticed a single character in my profile has changed.  An 8 and changed to a 9 - yes folks it is my birthday today and I've entered my fifth decade on this planet.  My daughter is constantly now reminding me that I have only one year until I'm 50, however I was thinking it funny that we actually count our ages as years past.  You are nought when born... funny you don't count money like that or houses... who lives a 0 Station Road?  If we counted years like money I'd be 50 already. An inevitable sign of my age is that I needed new glasses, the biggest problem the last years is reading I have to take them off to read then back on to look at the TV etc.  So I've got a pair of varifocals now.  I'll see how I get on with them but so far not too bad.   Although I get strange looks as I move my head about looking at things at the moment, I'm trying to figure out the best bit to look through for this or that. A...

This month I'll have been married 24 years. Next month my son will be 19. Later this year I'll be 47 and my daughter 14. Sorry! I am my Dad and he'll have been gone 25 years this October, that's more than half my life I've been without my Dad! No that's a whole other post... or a whole blog... or lots of counselling. Briefly I have spent a lot of time regretting and over compensating that I could never show my Dad that I could be a success in life. Over the next few years we hit many big milestones. Next year obviously is our silver wedding anniversary. I'll have a son who will be in his 20s! The year after he'll be 21 and my Daughter will be 16! Then the year after that I'll be 50!!! (running out of !'s you know) Somewhere along the line I went to sleep a teenager and woke up a middleaged "responsible" adult. Problem is I don't often feel like one in some ways I often feel like the teenager - you should have seen my son ...

I read an article today about rapamycin which is a drug that may lead to the creation of some kind of anti-ageing pill. I'll not go into the ethics of all this ... in a world of increasing population, esp an ageing one in the developed world in which already we have a major elderly care crisis and future pensions crisis etc. But the one thing that did tickle me is that the drug, rapamycin, is named after Easter Island where it was first isolated in soil samples taken there. Whilst historians and ecologists argue the exact facts there is a body of opinion that the population of Easter Island somewhere about 1700 basically was pretty much wiped out. Some of the theories about this are that the massive deforestation of the island could have been a major cause and one reason for this possibly was the zealot like worship of a religion on the island that led to the raising of the famous statues. It just tickled me that we are naming the "elixir of life" (as I saw on one...

So I blogged about this a little while back in March. It is that time! I'm clearly getting old(er). Today I had to move out of the fast lane at swimming as I was clearly getting in the way of the young(er) and fitter who wanted to get past this ageing numpty who plods along doing breaststroke. The other thing is that there are more people swimming these days. Time was if there were 3 of us in the fast lane that was a busy day, now it's regular 5 or 6 or more and that's a little crowded anyways. Unfortunately I'm too fast for the slow lane and don't want to go in there and upset the "never get the hair wet" brigade as they enjoy their slow swimming - to be honest I think of it as floating with some forward motion - and don't want some fool splashing past them every other length. So I was in the "open swimming" bit, which was okay but some folks don't just swim up and down but sideways and also that's where you get the "swim i...

Or rather - Am I that age already? :-) I go swimming normally 2 or 3 times a week first thing in the morning. Have done for years, the pool I go to has an early riser discount deal and is good as it has a large 25m fitness pool with at least two lanes available for lane swimming. There is a slow and a fast lane. I've always been in the fast lane. Today there were about 5 of us in there, a reasonably busy day which is typical for a Friday but okay. However I soon noticed as I chugged my way through my mile all breaststroke that everyone else was faster than me and I was regularly being overtaken. That is the first time I can remember that ever happening, I'm not always the fastest in the lane but I can't rememeber ever being the slowest. Oh dear am I to be consigned to the slow lane? Is this just an inevitable outcome of my age?