See - definitive proof - didn't have oatmeal last night. Blood this morning was 6.2. Oatmeal is a blood sugar depressant, I tell ya.
Annnyway, how the Hell are we all? I was reminded of a Douglas Adams quote tonight while on the bike.
"Well, the hours are good. Though now you come to mention it, most of the minutes are pretty lousy..."
It struck me that when all this is over and I'm whatever size and whatever activity level I'm going to be at the end of it all, I'll look back on it fondly, with laughter and memories and wry smiles at all the mails of support. I have a feeling I won't actually remember how bloody, back-snappingly, life-drainingly hard some of it feels while I'm actually doing it. See - the hours will be good, even though most of the minutes are pretty lousy. Knew a lot more than he thought he did, that man.
It was as I was thinking about all this, to ignore the small numbers on the bike's milometer and the nauseating boredom of effective exercise, that 40 tapped me on the shoulder and shuffled into the room.
I've always maintained that age is just a convenient number we attach to ourselves based on hard available evidence - it's a day count, basically, not an energy count, an enthusiasm count or anything else. Nothing dramatically wonderful, nor dramatically awful, has to happen to you simply because you reach birthdays with a zero at the end of them.
And it was while I was thiniking that that 40 coughed, respectfully, like Jeeves in the PG Wodehouse stories, and murmured "Actually sir, I think you'll find you're talking bollocks..."
"I say, 40," I thought, getting perhaps rather too much into character. "Are you sure?"
40 reminded me of what happened as I approached my 30th birthday (which would be ten years ago, for those not good with the maths or just not keeping up). My "list of stuff to do" had some fairly typically 30ish stuff on it - "have at least my first drum lesson," "get published within a year," and "save the world" were notable additions as I approached the not-really-so-freakin'-big-after-all-3-0.
On my 30th birthday, I was taken for the first, and, probably mercifully for civilisation as a whole, my last ever drum lesson, so the day had at least a sense of box-ticking satisfaction to it. And the whole "save the world" thing manifested itself as a growing restlessness working for corporate entities. I wanted to go off and be part of something bigger than myself - and not really that long afterwards, I got a job at a trade union, and then a charity, to fulfill the urge that had started growing in me on the upswing to my thirtieth birthday.
As I pedalled tonight, I examined my ambitions for 40. "Get a Kindle," seemed to burn bright among them, not even so much because of a craving for the gadget itself, but because the alternative is packing up all my books and lugging them to our new home, wherever and whenever we move. Seemed a very 40ish ambition, that. Bollocks to rock and roll rebellion and making a big noise, just give me a comfy chair and a Kindle...
"Get published within a year" is still there, irritating away like an itch that won't shut the Hell up till it finally gets scratched. And in place of the world-saving, which by the way, I'm soooo over, something I've never had an inkling to do till now has surfaced.
"Work for yourself," it says. "Put something out into the world, regularly, that people like, and are prepared to pay for. A humorous magazine, probably."
Now, I have no idea where that came from, but it surfaced in me last time I was home in Merthyr, a sudden urge to - as it originally announced itself to me - "Do a Ben Franklin". Nooooo idea if it's feasible, especially in this climate. Although of course it could be argued that this climate is precisely when people might be most prepared to pay for a regular, guaranteed, better-than-freakin'-lolcatz laugh. So who knows? I only know that when I got the urge to 'save the world,' I did it in a fashion that was good enough at least for my brain. So - might be one to watch, that.
And finally, as I opened my eyes and saw the numbers had grown agreeably on the bike, I realised another thing. As much as anything, this is why I'm doing all this - why I'm enjoying the hours and loathing some of the minutes, and doing the bloody things anyway: If life begins at 40...you've got to be there. You've got to be able to take advantage of everything you've learned, and put it to use. You've got to live, and be reasonably healthy (within the scope of your body's abilities), or you haven't got what it takes to do what you want to do.
And so I carried on pedalling.
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