I’ve been starting to feel my age recently. Little nagging aches and pains everywhere, even gardening is exhausting and a real chore. I can see why people don’t want big gardens any more. I’m also finding myself short tempered and grumpy about… well everything really… and why not? I’ve bloody earned the right to be pissed off.

I think part of it is that when you hit your fifties, you’ve been around and seen a lot, and frankly, you’ve heard and seen the same bullshit over and over again, so you can see right through it and you just don’t have the patience to deal with other people’s crap any longer.

I think part of it too is that you not only lose the physical joy, but the emotional and spiritual joy of life as well. Cos you’ve seen it and done it all before. You get jaded, life loses its magic and its ability to surprise. Kind of like how Xmas is no longer so exciting after you reach puberty. Instead of leaping out of bed at 6am to see if Santa’s been, you want to lie in til 10, cos you spent half the previous night masturbating furiously into a sock.

I read something, somewhere… I can’t be bothered finding it again, anyway it listed a number of reasons why middle aged gits like me are angry all the time. One of them is if you are in your fifties and you find yourself looking after an elderly parent or parents. That’s me. They’re really demanding on your time, and they’ve regressed to an infant stage, and quite frankly, you yourself are too old and sore to deal with that shit every damn day.

Part of my general malaise is also due to a lack of fitness too. Having a sedentary office job for years on end doesn’t help. It’s like everything on your body that used to be firm starts to slide south, nipples, belly, penis. Then one day you look in the mirror and think, fuck, who’s that old prick? Or as I best heard it expressed by a forgotten Oz comedian, you’re getting intimate with your girlfriend and you look up and catch the action in the mirror, and you think, ‘Why is my dad shagging my girlfriend?’

Another aspect of the malaise of ageing is that you become set in your ways. You’ve pretty much settled your opinion on politics, music, film, ideology, beliefs, etc. So when you’re confronted by someone with a contradictory opinion, you just want to strangle the fucker for being so stupid, ignorant and blind to the truth.

Oh and you also discover that what you always suspected was true – they are out to screw you over, from the cradle to the grave, and there’s fuck all you can do about it, because you can never be sure who they are. They’re clever like that, the bastards!

So I am confronted by my own mortality at last. It occurs to me, shit, this is the downward spiral. I’ve only got another twenty to thirty years, if I’m lucky. Got a letter in the mail form the government the other day. They want me to do another screening test. Bowel Cancer Screening, the sequel. I know it’s a good thing, and of course I’ll do it again. But it’s just another official timely reminder, hey buddy, you’re old.

Another reason of the grumpiness for the fifty plus set is the sudden realisation that you’ve wasted your life and the best years are behind you. Could you have achieved more? Actually, I’m ambivalent about this one. Don’t beat yourself up, we can’t all be famous, and a lot of famous people are shallow arseholes. I’ve written a book, edited another book, hopefully got another one coming soon, and a couple more after that, and I’m heading up to my fiftieth publication. So it’s not all doom and gloom.

I recall the first time I was made aware of my own mortality. I was 35 years old, young, fit and sexy. Flying from Vietnam to Japan on Vietnam Airlines. The only white guy on the plane. All the announcements were in Vietnamese. So I’m happily sitting there reading, when suddenly, BANG! Big explosion. The plane… well let me take a step back here and say that as a young man, fantasising about heroic romantic death (cos you do that sort of shit when you’re young), I always imagined a plane going down would do so gracefully, the nose gently arcing downward toward the earth. But no, turns out a plane drops out of the air like a fucking stone!

This one sure did. All the overhead lockers slammed open and shit flew everywhere. All the passengers started screaming, and even worse, screaming in a foreign tongue and the guy screamed over the tannoy and I didn’t know what the fuck was happening and it suddenly occurred to me – oh fuck! I am not immortal after all. I am going to die!

Then the plane levelled out and carried on.

Turned out it was just a bit of turbulence.

It actually lasted about ten seconds, but it felt like ten years.

It was a white knuckle ride for me from that moment on I tell you. Every bit of plane rattling turbulence had me gripping the seat, and it has done ever since. From that day on, I knew the clock was ticking. Carpe diem, seize the day and all that.

So yeah, mortality. I need to do something to stave death off a bit. Yoga maybe. Go back to the gym. Get a bike again. Start fasting again. One positive step I have taken is to use my second work long service leave to work a 4 day week on full pay. I take every Wednesday off for the next several months. Really breaks up the week and actually allows me to get stuff done, like the bloody garden. I’m really starting to enjoy the freedom, fresh air and exercise, the mental break from the bullshit of everyday life. Best of all, spending some quality time with my favourite person in the world, me, without other people giving me the absolute shits, is just invaluable. If I didn’t have a mortgage, I’d segue this day off into two, then three, and so on until I never went to work at all. I’d spend every day gardening, exercising, exploring, travelling to interesting and different places… and wanking into a sock like a horny teenager.