Ageing Certainly Isn't for Sissies!

 

Hello all, it is lovely to be back with you today as I begin my sixty ninth year of being here.

 

 

     So, its sixty eight years since I lay there , virtually bald, toothless, pudgy knee'd and fascinated by those starfish things at the end of my arms that I couldn't do anything with.

 

     Since then I'd gone through many ages and stages, gauche with puppy fat and a serious preference to enter rooms having crawled in between the underlay and the carpet, attention being something I loathed.   The early years of settling into my own skin have been very interesting and there are many more stories to tell but for now I want to focus on this thing called ageing because I find it fascinating.

     Truth be told I wasn't really sure I'd get this far, having had breast cancer a few years ago I did think my goose might have been cooked but apparently it was mildly toasted with twenty doses of radiotherapy  and I'm still here and am very happy to be so.

     When I was thirty I loved a fellow who was just a little younger than me, he was a wandering minstrel in a time when there were none and he struggled with thirty.   I remember meeting up with him and he asked me what it was like and I said it was great, I didn't have to lie if I wanted a comic and that is how I saw it.   Sadly he was completely thrown by it and took an overdose two weeks before his thirtieth birthday.   I was heartbroken and was incensed, I wanted to hit him but he had made his choice and we all have the right to stay or leave.    I am not ready to go anywhere soon but when the time comes I hope that the system will be in place to permit me to make my choice and enable me to have a dignified death at a time of my choosing.

     Forty was fine too, marriage and babies are the two best things that I never did so I have been able to focus on me and keep myself  'in the game' so to speak.   I don't need child friendly cars and my home is simply full of me, no wardrobe is empty, I have, like a koi carp, grown to the size of my environment so all four of my bedrooms are full of me and my stuff and I feel neither guilt or shame.   I love my life with a passion and have accepted that with every choice I've made there has been a consequence.

     For the first half an hour or so of fifty I was a bit uncomfortable, my half century had been reached but I settled into it and soon had no problems with it and I was still having adventures which is, for me, the essence of the ageing process.   

     When I was in my early sixties I found my cancer but it was sorted and I survived it and discovered that it gave me a new outlook on life.   I became a 'why not me?' having rejected the notion that my cancer had been some sort of  punishment for some sin or other, I do not subscribe to worshiping deities, I worship life.    Onwards and upwards is my motto, I healed and grew from the experience and I'm still here rocking my do!

      Now I am a lot closer to my seventies than my sixties, only one more year and I will start that milestone seventieth and hopefully it will be as much fun as my sixties have been.    Honestly they really have been good, warts and all.    They haven't all been plain sailing, there have been disappointments, losses, heartaches and endings but I have very few regrets and am optimistic that there is much more to look forward to.

     I have always been able to look for the positive in any situation and apply this to my take on life.   So my arse and tits are not where they were.   One boob is a bit mangled and smaller and perter than the other one which is heading south.   I have a body that is best on radio and there are lots of wrinkly bits, but they're my wrinkly bits and I've earned them.    It isn't about looks and body really, although most of  like to make the best of ourselves, it is what is in our hearts that really counts.   I try to live a decent life, the ten commandments are very logical to me despite my atheism, and life continues to be wonderful.

     I have seen what retirement does to people so I decided to continue working, I'm not keen to put on the 'old lady uniform', you know the one, the turquoise car coat, pleated skirt and zippy boots and fake fur hat that lurk in shops waiting to envelop us olds.    I love my dead folk and having found myself on the back cover of The Lady recently I  am now looking into being a mature model having been told that I may have a niche look and it will be interesting to see if I have any potential.   So hopefully a new adventure may be in the offing and I will embrace it with relish because.....ageing isn't for sissies any more than life is.

     Whatever happens must be embraced and learned from, we don't arrive with a tag on our toe saying three score and ten wonderful years, we get what we get and do our do........so please, go out there and do your do, don't just sit on the platform waiting for the train because you're already on it and dammit although its a bumpy ride sometimes that's what makes it great.

     Positivity is what I wish for you all, be brave and don't take yourself too seriously, who cares what or if there is anything next, work on the now because that is all that we can be sure of, we're here NOW!