I'm nearly 60

Irvin, February 2023

During the ski trip there was a theme running through the week, which started on the overnight Eurostar going out. I found myself in the small hours, still awake and trying to get comfortable enough to sleep by lying on the floor rather than sitting up in a chair. "I'm nearly 60," I thought. "I don't think my younger self would have anticipated that I'd be lying on the floor of a train trying to sleep when I'm nearly 60." Subsequently, when on previous trips I'd have been working out when the last ski lift would enable me to get home at the end of the day, on this trip at about 2.30 p.m. we started to consider getting back for a bath and supper. "After all, we're nearly 60..."

Then last week I played in two badminton matches. Towards the end of the second one I completely ran out of steam. Luckily I was paired with a much younger partner who did all the running about that I would previously have considered to be my role. I'm really am nearly 60, in so many aspects of life.

Coming back from the ski trip I was expecting UJ to reappear within a couple of days. She had gone home to fetch her cat and I thought she had made all the arrangements and booked transport, but arrangements can be altered and cancelled, and she gave me a new date when she was planning to come without the cat. That date also came and went, and now it may be March. I'm not holding my breath.

Before she went, she drew my attention to the draughty state of the windows in her room, and she has a point. So I called upon Doors and Windows Ulf, who diagnosed old hinges and has gone away to order some new ones. So that needs to happen at some point.

The Film Festival run by Mr M and Lola II went swimmingly as usual, with a new introductory trailer and a fantastic advertisement for Random Cuts, the hairdressing service offered by Lola II ("Only 15 minutes bus ride from the nearest A&E!") My music group restarted, there's the usual Buddhist activity, and I was able to take in another dog, called Irvin. Only for 24 hours, which was quite enough - he's not done much training, and it shows! I've been spoiled by the dogs that are later in their training like Caddie and Pat.

The dental work is going fairly well, I've been allowed to move on to my sixth set of aligners (out of 37), and yesterday I had one of my back molars extracted by my very lovely dentist. It's a shame that I see him mainly for painful treatments. In fact, despite the difficulty of the extraction and the state of the resulting extraction site, it hurts very little today. The dentist's commentary as we went along was also interesting - I had to have extra anaesthetic because of my 'interesting jaw anatomy' and apparently I'm very good at clotting. I told him that this information will all be very useful when I create my online dating profile.

Not feeling it

Lola Towers, May 2022

I haven't felt much like blogging recently, which is unusual. I've had a busy time as  always - immediately after mum's accident I was visiting her and dad twice a week alongside Sister D and Lola II, to the exclusion of anything much else. Then we could reduce our visits to once a week, and now thankfully mum and dad's situation is more stable - we have two reliable carers with another about to be tested, which makes it much less likely that I'll be called on to help when I'm not due to be going there anyway. But there's been some resistance on my part to sitting and typing.

I managed a week's skiing in France with five friends (two of whom did not ski), travelling by train and bus rather than flying. I prefer the idea of overland travel, but in reality it was almost as uncomfortable as flying. The journey out was on the Eurostar overnight, and although we were lucky enough to have lots of space with spare seats, none of us got any sleep to speak of. The weather when we arrived was glorious sunshine all week but this meant it was cold, and the snow was thin in some places although obviously not thawing. I really enjoyed the skiing and also spending time with friends whom I don't see that often, including Friend-Of-The-Blog CERNoise.

It's now a few days later and I'm at Mr M and Lola II's film festival. Not much time for sitting and blogging, so I'll post this now and perhaps find more motivation when I get home. And here's another bonus picture from the garden last year.

What I've been reading

Genome
by Matt Ridley

"Arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the new century, the mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome raises almost as many questions as it answers."

It's an old book, published back in 1999 when the human genome was close to being revealed, and was already out of date then. This is my second reading of this book, and a reminder of the incredible story of life on Earth, all of which uses the same building blocks of DNA bases. This fact completely blows my mind - what must it be like to have been the first to discover it?

In the Sign of the Golden Wheel
by Sangharakshita

"From his hermitage in the foothills of the Himalayas, Sangharakshita travels across India to a moving and dramatic climax—addressing hundreds of thousands of ex-Untouchables following the sudden death of their hero, the remarkable Dr Ambedkar, only weeks after their mass conversion to Buddhism."

The third volume of autobiography, and as for the previous two there's an awful lot of day-to-day meeting people and listing of names, with a few slightly more exciting nuggets among the soup, like meeting the young Dalai Lama, and addressing the newly converted ex-Untouchables on the death of their leader, Dr Ambedkar. During this time came the writing of his first major work, The Survey of Buddhism, which I believe remains a seminal work.

Men at Arms
by Evelyn Waugh

narrated by Christian Rodska

"Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook."

I think this could be said to be 'of it's time', in that I'm not sure I got the most out of the story of a man trying to find a way to fight in the Second World War. There's probably a lot of subtle humour that I missed, given that I know nothing of army officers, commissions, ranks or anything of the sort. But it's another title ticked off the list of Classics (which includes nine titles by Evelyn Waugh).

The Professor's House
by Willa Cather

narrated by Sean Runnette

"On the eve of his move to a new, more desirable residence, Professor Godfrey St. Peter finds himself in the shabby study of his former home. Surrounded by the comforting, familiar sights of his past, he surveys his life and the people he has loved — his wife Lillian, his daughters, and Tom Outland, his most outstanding student and once, his son-in-law to be."

When I leave big gaps between parts of an audio book I often find it difficult to pick up the story again, but I listened to this in only a few sittings including a long drive, and this should have made the characters more distinct. But at the end of the book I didn't feel I'd learned anything or got to know any of the characters, and I couldn't even be sure that I'd really understood what the book was about. A pity, because I enjoyed the previous book from this author.

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

"Six interlocking lives in a narrative that circles the globe and reaches from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route in reverse to its starting point."

This book has a novel structure where each of six stories is half told before moving to the next, then returning to the second halves in reverse order. It could be quite an interesting idea except that there seemed no point to it - nothing significant was carried from one story to the next, and it would have been less confusing for the book simply to consist of six short stories, which were all perfectly self-contained and well formed.