Reasons To Be Cheerful (2)

I do a lot of whining about being old and fat, but if I look at things objectively, I can fix the "fat" and as for the "old", well, recently I've started to become aware that there are some benefits.

The people I work for no longer have aspirations to turn me into a Corporate Warrior. As far as I'm concerned I've always been a bass player who has to work as a spreadsheet-jockey to pay the bills; I've spent years fighting off well-meaning buffoons who seemed determined to drag me, squealing piteously, out of my comfort-zone. But now, yay! They've stopped. I need never again fear being sent on those residential training courses where you have to form teams, build bridges across treacherous ravines, light fires by rubbing things together and then use the embers to bake a hedgehog for supper. My boss knows that my main ambitions are limited to getting to Friday night without getting fired and to retire at fifty-five still in possession of my immortal soul, my integrity and all my marbles. (Most of the hair and some of the teeth have gone already, but I can't blame that entirely on the company.)

I got through my mid-life crisis! On my way to work last week I watched the motor-cyclists weaving through the four lanes of stationary traffic that is the rush-hour M25 and realised with a strange mixture of emotions that I DON'T WANT A BIG BIKE ANY MORE! Too fast, too cold, too wet, too fucking scary. I think my hip-joints are too shot to let me get astride anything much anyway. And if I find I need black leather and restricting headgear in my life there's a shop in town that's promised to help me out. All through my forties I didn't buy one single 1950s jukebox, not one Porsche, no Harleys. No adventure holidays involving drinking competitions or parascending, no obsessive exercise regimes involving personal trainers, no weird fad diets based on unlikely combinations of incompatible foodstuffs. Admittedly there was a certain amount of ill-advised sexual activity, and the cost of my resulting divorce would have bought many Kawazakis, but I still reckon I got off lightly.