Who's The Daddy: The joy (and slight horror) of growing older together
“What a drag it is getting old” said Mick Jagger, now aged 82, 60 years ago. But he had a point. Ageing is an absolute pain - literally, when your bad knee can tell you what the weather’s doing before you even get out of bed - but it’s way better than the alternative.
For instance, once you hit your mid-50s, our wonderful NHS sends out a routine bowel cancer screening test kit every two years, and gives you a result within a fortnight or so without fear of bankruptcy through medical bills if the results aren’t good - like what happens to tens of thousands of Americans every year.
For those unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of it, a little package containing a barbed plastic cocktail stick and a tube, along with a set of very specific instructions is delivered to your door and the rest is down to you.
Without wishing to put anyone off their dinner, you do your business and before you flush, poke it with the little stick so the barbed end is coated, stick it in the tube, then in the cardboard envelope, then stick it in the post.
In the 10-and-a-half years we’ve had our sighthound Walter, I reckon I’ve taken him on around 4,000 walks, and at four poos a walk (we call dumps “downloading” and wees “streaming”, me and him) that’s somewhere in the region of 16,000 dumps - which although unpleasant to pick up in a little black plastic bag, don’t fill me with the same horror as prodding at my own. Once. Actually, twice. The first time during my debut test in the spring of 2024. All clear, thank goodness.
From the ridiculous to the sublime, this weekend marks me and The Boss’ 28th wedding anniversary - three years past silver and two years off pearl. Nobody prepares you for how fast the years fly past. It’s like we blinked in the late 1990s and now we’re in our mid-50s with two grown-and-flown daughters, a dog that commanders the sofa from 7pm every night and a low-carb, high-protein and fibre diet. And each other, goes without saying.
One of the few genuine delights of social media is the excellent Fesshole, where people anonymously post things you’d think twice before confessing to a priest. One chap wrote in to say he and his wife sat down to watch their wedding video for the first time in decades, but it was so depressing to see how young, fit and full of energy they once were, they turned it off in disgust.
Due to our middle-aged regime of diet and fitness, we’d like to think we’re better nick than in April 1998, albeit with a few more miles on the clock.
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