Personal stuff
From The Divine Sarah at Insty (no link):
She’s quite right. I’ve always had what my mother referred to as a “weak chest” (whooping cough as a child, winter bronchitis all my life), and when I caught a mild case of pneumonia in the early 1990s, it took about three months and massive doses of antibiotics to recover fully. It’s the reason I quit driving for Uber when the Chinkvirus hit.
Let’s be careful out there.
No post today, sorry. I started one but it was too difficult to write. I’ll try to have it done by next week.
I can’t believe I’m even talking about this, but these are the times we live in.
Some men have admitted to keeping underwear for more than 20 years, a new poll has found. Clothing firm Tom Clinch conducted a poll, which found that the average British man only buys new pants once every five years.
Put me in the “5 years” category, for one simple reason. I only wear undies from Marks & Spencer, I buy about 20 pairs at a time, and I rotate them conscientiously.
And they’re all black. I’ve been buying these for over twenty years:
One style, one color. Life is too short for me to waste time on stupid shit like deciding which underwear to wear every morning, but least I’m not the guy who takes 20 years to decide to get new ones. (Seriously?)
And all that said, life is too short for me to write about this nonsense, and for you to waste your time reading it. We now return to our regular fare of guns, Commie-hatred, ill-tempered invective and patriotic bodacious wimmens (sample below).
…for not posting anything last Saturday. There was a post scheduled, only I scheduled it for April 16th instead of May 16. Then, when I tried to fix it by changing the post date, I set it for for May 23rd instead of May 16th (because since the Chinkvirus lockdown, I’ve lost all sense of time and one date is pretty much the same as another). As I sink further into senile decrepitude, I seem to be wandering through life in a daze anyway. It’s quite embarrassing.
The errant post will appear next Saturday, as incorrectly rescheduled.
And for those several Readers who contacted me in a panic, wondering if I was okay: many thanks for your solicitude.
Now back to our regular program of invective, lust, violence and man-gun love.
The other day I made reference to the fact that I would be unlikely to be flying anywhere in 2020, and might only do so in late 2021 — and for the first time in my life, I said to myself, “…should I live that long.”
I think the most depressing thing about getting old is that you get wary of making long-term plans — the old joke “I’m so old, I don’t even buy green bananas anymore” is a perfect example — and it can be depressing.
It doesn’t have to be, of course. A friend of my own vintage recently embarked on a business venture which involves a massive construction project, and when I asked him when the whole thing will be finished, he said airily, “About fifteen or twenty years’ time.” If that is true, he would be around eighty years old at completion date.
I’m not sure I would do anything like that. At the same time, I’m still buying green bananas, so to speak, so there’s that.
At some point in a person’s life, you become resigned to the fact that you’ll never climb Everest, or race at Monaco, or make a billion dollars, or sleep with some famous beauty (maybe because she just died). Those are the big dreams, of course, and mostly — realistically, even — just pipe dreams. Still, their disappearance is a little of a jolt; which is probably a preparation for a much bigger disappointment when you realize that your age precludes you from doing something that you did only little while ago. As an example, I’m most likely never going to be able to go deer-stalking in Scotland with Mr. Free Market, Doc Russia and Combat Controller again, because the trudging over the uneven ground of the Cairngorm Mountains is, to put it mildly, unthinkable. I made a joke about that with the guys during a telemeeting, the other day, and said that if I were to do it again, I would only ever shoot at a distance no further than 50 yards away from the Land Rover — i.e. close to the road — whereupon Mr. Free Market said bluntly, “Then you’re never going to take another shot” (because most of the stalks now involve a prospect of a mile or two’s scrambling before the deer even come within a respectable shooting distance, assuming they haven’t moved in the interim).
So goodbye to all that, then.
It’s even more poignant when you think of your approaching end with regards to family and friends, especially family. New Wife’s elder son has given her a grandson; my own kids’ prospect of doing the same is becoming more and more remote with each year. That, actually, doesn’t bother me too much as I’ve never been one of those parents who pushes their kids to provide grandchildren — in fact, I specifically told mine that I would never push them that way, and I’ve kept my promise. But it also means that I’ll never be able to do the grandfather things with grandsons that my own grandpa did with me, and that’s a little sad.
If you reach that point where you start making a mental list of “things I’m realistically never going to do”, two things are going to happen: the first is that you’ll give a mental shrug about some of them and say, “Oh well” and realize that the left undone isn’t important — I’m never going to fly an ultralight aircraft again or take my first parachute jump, for example.
But for the others: do not be surprised if some of them hurt (as in the grandchildren scenario above, for example). I will in all probability never meet up with some old and valued friends ever again, simply because of geography. I will never hunt bear in Alaska (see “Scotland”, above, for reasons) — in fact, I may never hunt anything again, except maybe high birds with Mr. FM next year — and even then, I’m going to need to save a bunch of money to be able to afford the trip, money that I’m not at all certain of making (see: Chinkvirus and similar disasters for reasons). And I might need not one but two years to save that money, at which time I’ll be nearly 68 years old. Fuck. I might not even be able to make the walk from the Range Rover to the shooting positions at that age, and my already-shaky and fast-deteriorating eyesight might make the whole proposition impossible anyway.
As one gets older, one’s options start to shrink. I watched a feature about Paul Newman the other night; he only started auto racing in his early fifties, and won his last race at age eighty. That doesn’t give me any hope at all, mind you, because Paul Newman was also a zillionaire, and lots of money does have an annoying tendency to make dreams come true a lot more quickly. For some old guy drawing a meager Social Security check and needing a side gig to make ends meet, those — maybe any — kinds of dreams become increasingly unreachable.
All of which makes the picture in my masthead a lot more poignant even than it was when I first chose it. I am wonderfully blessed by having found New Wife so that at least I can share the rest of my life with someone I love; but figuratively speaking, our age might just cause us both to be confined to that lonely bench because with age, options disappear, horizons shrink and dreams fall apart.
And what happens when you can no longer afford green bananas?
If anything good has come out of the Chinkvirus pandemic, it’s this:
A comprehensive study of behaviours and attitudes since the outbreak began found that three in five people will stop greeting friends with a hug and a kiss, and will also avoid crowded places in the future.
Include me in that number, although I hardly ever did it anyway. This modern thing of men hugging other men who are not family has always given me the heebies. I hug my son — and not even that often — and occasionally my friend Trevor (who insists on doing it because he knows it bugs me, and I don’t kill him because he’s my friend). Other than that, ugh.
I don’t mind shaking hands, however, because I was brought up to do that with men, further affection being communicated by a punch or slap on the shoulder.
But not with women. Unless it’s a business thing, I’m always tempted to turn a handshake with a woman into kissing her hand; mostly, it’s greeted with giggles and sighs. If I add, “Sorry, but I was brought up to love and respect women,” the response is universally positive. Hugging is too intimate; kissing a hand denotes respect.
As for hugging and kissing women I know… well, I’m never going to stop doing that. (At the doctor’s the other day, I complained to his nurse practitioner — whom I’ve known for over fifteen years — that I wasn’t going to molest her as I usually do when I visit. She shook her head sadly and said, “And I always look so forward to it, too.” Aaah, Texas.)
Ultimately, though, I think that for the next few years we as a society are going to be more comfortable about keeping other people — and certainly strangers — at arm’s length, so to speak. And that’s a Good Thing. But as time passes, we’ll forget all about pandemic behavior and relapse into over-familiarity, which isn’t.