Old Age
When first I moved up here from London I was expecting change, after all I was about to get married and I was also buying a house for the first time.
I expected the biggest change to be marriage, I’d heard all the negative arguments from a variety of divorced mates - ‘Miss out the middleman and just buy a house for someone you hate.’ was one of the best.
I was a little bit worried that the act of standing in front of everyone I held dear and saying “I do” would start a cataclysmic string of events that would end with me lying on the pavement outside ‘Burger King’, knocking back Diamond white cider and shouting vehement nonsense at anyone who passed by, but as it turned out that was my Stag-night.
Anyway, the marriage lark turned out to be just a good excuse for a great p**s-up with your mates and a nice holiday with the woman you love. Buying a house has been far more traumatic.
After years of renting places I figured I was just getting a different landlord; you pay Mr Omar £820 a month, you pay Mr Nationwide £815 a month. Big deal, re-write the standing order, no change. How wrong was I.
There were certain things I was looking forward to; a life where I no longer had to tolerate my landlord’s taste in interior décor was one. I was longing to cast the Flock wallpaper back into the bin that it should never have got out of (I found a website yesterday that’s claiming it’s making a come back! Nooooooooooooo!)
I was looking forward to buying furniture that wasn’t made from ‘pine-effect’ veneer and throwing carpets into the skip, purely on the grounds that they looked more aesthetically pleasing in that new location. What I wasn’t expecting was ‘gardening’.
As a young child I was occasionally, compelled to push a hover mower over my parents lawn. I found this a traumatic experience, almost as harrowing as their requests to ‘please wash the dishes’ and ‘can you tidy your room?’ At the time I felt this was a just a parent’s way of hinting that, at heart, they hated you and wished you to suffer before your time. 20 odd years later and I hadn’t really changed my mind.
Gardening was something old folk did in order to make their peace with the soil before they were buried in it. Washing dishes was something that you did when you could no longer get into the kitchen and, in order to avoid any hint of ‘Obsessive Compulsive Disorder’, you only tidied your room when it was Spring… but not every Spring.
That was but a few short years ago. Now I am sat looking out into the garden that I have created and thanking the Lord that it is raining, as the lawn’s looking a tad on the yellow side of green.
I am glad that it’s raining???? What kind of middle aged trap have I fallen for when I am rejoicing in drizzle? What has happened to the days of my youth when a perfect Summer involved no rain at all? When a hose-pipe ban meant nothing, for the simple reason that I didn’t own a hose-pipe. When as long as mud didn’t come out of the taps I was a happy-chappy. Where have these halcyon days gone? What’s happened to the boy who’s ideal Summer involved tar running down the street? Where have those Summer’s of diving and ‘motor-surfing’ down at the local gravel pits with my best mates, Si and Riv, gone? What has happened to the days when grass was just something you walked on when the sign said not to and when you didn’t give a flying f&ck if it was yellow, green or indigo?
I suspect that this is my first step into middle age. Currently I am only suffering the effect of ‘rain is a good thing’, but sooner or later I’ll start to think tartan slippers are in vogue, I’ll be waxing lyrical about my new combi-boiler and I wont be able to go out for a night on the town without first trimming my nasal hair.
Mind you, the lawn looks lovely…. Arrrrrrgh! Stopit, stopit now…and put down those nasal hair trimmers this minute…Arrrrgh!
