Being Me

Just checking out a fellow blogger's baby experiences and a big advert pops up with great big letters asking me, 'ARE YOU IN LABOUR?' Well .... I wasn't expecting to be, and I'm 48 next birthday, and certain surgical procedures have been undertaken that we were assured were usually permanent ... but I guess it's POSSible. So, maybe I AM. Hang on!  But that means .... Oh, gosh, I'm so reLIEVED.  This explains EVERything ..... The gradually increasing waistline (now I don't feel so bad about that elastic giving way and pinging into the face of the lady on the bus). The feeling that I need to lie down in a bed most of the day (now I can tell my boss that there is a REASON I need to teach from a supine position). The flutterings in the tummy I keep thinking are hunger (now I know there's a baby in there needing food, I can have three cakes instead of two). The mood swings (now I can carry on moving from 'I feel great...

Granted, plain earlobes are just boring. I mean, there's a nice little piece of flesh, just aching for a diamond or a dangly silver thing, and if you just leave it as it is, in the end it's just a little piece of flesh: redundant or what? And I don't know about you, but I have enough little pieces of flesh hanging around my body doing nothing useful; I don't need more. So I may as well decorate the bits that are decent enough to be on show. I'm not sure I'd go as far as some, though. For me, the delicate silver stud or the faux diamond are as far as I'm prepared to take earlobe enhancement. But there's now a fashion, and not just in remote tribal areas, for making the holes in your earlobes massive by putting, firstly, small discs in the holes in them, then bigger discs, then bigger ones, etc etc, until they'll take jewellery the size of dinner plates. But what happens when you get old? You wake up one day. You're 73. And suddenly, the gaping ...

I don't know what it is about middle age, but every time I think I'm just about to reach it, it moves on a few years. When I was a teenager, I thought middle age was about twenty-three. Then, in my 20s, I decided it was thirty-five, as that was half-way to seventy, and didn't it say somewhere about three score years and ten?, although that still did seem incredibly old, and it was actually written in the Old Testament of the Bible, and they all lived to four hundred and ninety, so how did that work? That would make middle-age two-hundred and forty-five and that's a hell of a long time to wait for your pension. When I got to my 30s, middle-age moved again, to the 40s. Now I'm in my late 40s, and I still haven't got to middle age. I've revised it to 50, which is half way to a hundred, because don't you get a card from the Queen when you hit a hundred? In fact, they're thinking about pushing this on to 105, I hear, as so many people reach their cent...

It's depressing. When I walk through the shopping centre these days, people giving out certain kinds of leaflets ignore me. They are people publicising the following: beauty treatments the local club scene the gym baby equipment sports cars jeans shoes with high-heels singles holidays However, people advertising the following thrust their leaflets into my hands, coming up really close to do so just in case I can't manage the two yards to where they are: Saga holidays for the over 50s stairlifts incontinence aids plastic surgery exercise classes (gentle) clothes made of nylon wider-fit shoes anti-wrinkle creams Today, in town, I rebelled. A girl was giving out leaflets for a local dance centre which is holding free classes. She walked straight past me and was giving out a leaflet to someone younger, fitter and leaner, when I tapped on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, but could I have one of those?' She did give me a leaflet, but the look she gave ...