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.