Did you ever wonder why they stopped printing phone books?
I have identified two reasons.
Firstly, even “el cheapo” cell phones have facility to load the contact details of your favourite people into them.
Secondly, the only people who have landlines these days haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of reading the print in a phone book!
So why bother to print the book.
QED.
Somebody said that getting old is not for the faint-hearted.
Sadly, aging isn’t a voluntary process. Nor a reversible one – despite what the cosmetic, gymnasium, or plastic surgery industries would have us believe.
Age sneaks up like a thief in the night and resoundingly kneecaps you when you’re not watching.
Sure, you can stave aging off for a while if you’re determined. A healthy life style, gobbling down handfuls of vitamin tablets, or heading off to the gym encased (entombed?) in lurid pick or green hi-viz lycra tight enough to display all your indiscretions.
But if you don’t take aging too seriously it is a condition that can provide its own humour, albeit slightly black and perverse. In fact, if you’re not into gymnasia or facelifts, humour is the thing that will do you the best.
And it’s free!
I used to worry about eyesight, but I don’t see it as a problem now. How can I, when everything I look at today is so small and fuzzy on the edges?
Hearing, too, is a looming issue. Conversation and television programmes today come filtered through a winter-weight woolen sock. I did think for a while that I could overcome hearing-loss by learning to lip read – right up until the eyesight started to blur.
But aging allowed me to discover other stuff.
It started off being small stuff, like a reduction in available trouser belt holes. Or an increase in the distance between button and button hole.
But now the stuff is getting bigger and more important.
For a start, my feet used to be so much closer to my hands – the act of putting on socks or shoes never used to be a challenge. Or taking the socks and shoes off, either, if it comes to that.
But it seems age has either made my legs longer or my arms shorter. Either way, it has happened without my being consulted.
Birthdays that are a major in the aging stakes.
When you were young, your birthday seemed to come around maybe every two or three years.
Now the next birthday has arrived almost before the smoke detector has stopped going off from the candles of the last one!
And all the numbers seem to end with a five or a zero and a requirement to re-sit your driving licence.
Gravity, though not in itself part of the aging process, is another experience with which I have issues.
Gravity has such wide-ranging effects. On everything.
Once upon a time, if you dropped something, your quick reactions allowed you to catch it on its way down. Or you just bent over, picked it up without a second thought and moved on.
Now reaction time is such that whatever dropped is on the floor before you even realise that it has left your grasp. Unless, of course, there is somewhere even more inconvenient it can drop that is lower than the floor – such as over a bank.
The only things that don’t fall to the floor are the things that it would have been better if they had. Cooked egg of any type, tomato soup, ice cream (particularly boysenberry or chocolate flavoured), coffee dribbles, jam or anything else of a liquidy form. All will only go down as far as your shirt front. Or a really dark place under something that you can’t reach without getting on hands and knees.
Or, worse still, your trouser front.
And gravity not only affects things you were holding. It also affects hair.
I used to have hair on my head. I still have some there, but gravity has taken a lot of it further south to my ears and shoulders.
And my back.
There used to be a clear demarcation line between neck hair and chest hair. But now – as is the case with so many things – the line has become blurred, and where to stop shaving has become a threat to sanity.
And I really don’t want to discuss nasal hair.
Do I stop at the line of my shirt collar? Or do I just keep on mowing south until I reach somewhere hairless? Which may possibly mean I finish up shaving at the end of my toes.
My wife lovingly offered to help me with that. She was holding a pair of malevolently sharp bathroom scissors at the time, which made me just a little uneasy.
As she brought the scissors towards my nervously twitching nostril she got the giggles, making her hand shake alarmingly.
Health and safety (mine) made it judicious to separate her carefully from the scissors and resolve not to mention nasal hair again in her presence!
I don’t need to have a plain English contract, thank you. I will be quite content with the big print one!