Older, Wiser, Fitter

This week I’ve become fixated with old age, the years when people will turn up to my birthday candle blow outs in firefighter costumes and the usual Hip Hooray will change to Hip Replacement. I know I’ll soon appreciate reading glasses more than beer glasses, get confused between prostrate and prostate, and be so keen on female company that The Spice Girls will start to seem fanciable.

Alright, so the latter is never going to happen and if it did it would have more to do with cataracts than anything else, but it can’t be long till Sporty Spice changes her name to Gently Exercising Spice, Ginger to Blue Rinse, Scary to Embarrassing Auntie and, with the others, get their bus passes whilst Posh invites Hello magazine to photograph her bunion operations and laments how the Girls’ popularity dropped quicker than her boobs.

The Spices have cut short their world tour citing family reasons, but I think it’s more to do with having too many late nights on tour and missing their Horlicks. The girls have stockpiled money for their old age and I wish them the best of luck when they get there as there will be precious few other benefits. I have come to the simple conclusion that the older you get, the older you get. There’s nothing else.

Forget the propaganda of Wiser, or More Comfortable, or Wealthier. Each day simply means another twenty four hours nearer the kind lady in the nursing home mashing up your dinner or helping you look for your teeth.

Many couples who are friends of ours have reached that stage of life where they are suddenly turning in to decrepit versions of the toy Daleks in Woolworths, those remote controlled models that are pre programmed with just five phrases. They repeat the same words to each other over and over again - I Loathe You, I Hate You, It’s Off, I’m Leaving, and I’m Back Again and it’s self evidently ironic that the older we get, the more childish and immature we seem to become. It is then a short leap to dribbling and filling our nappies.

Personally, I have no problem in admitting that I am 32 years old. I have no problem with that because it’s not true, but I do have a problem in recently feeling bound for the scrap heap. What has brought this to a head is that I have been told by a doctor to stop running.

Following pains in my knees after doing heavy, competitive running classes three times a week, my specialist looked at the MRI photos with a smile and told me I’m part of the gym bunny generation he’s seeing every day – those idiots who have devoted their spare time to running machines and weights and have, consequently, knackered their bodies.

My shock absorbers have gone and I’m failing fast. I’m told by the Sports Injury specialist that if I don’t give up running now my racehorse chassis will move from thoroughbred to donkey and I’ll end my days ground in to glue and dog food at the local abattoir.

I guess I should feel lucky as I am still allowed to do other exercise like rowing or swimming, but these have always seemed to me to be a bit pansy compared to running, football or rugby. However, some of my gym generation pals are not so fortunate. One of my 5-a-side football mates, Mike, has had to give up all fitness because he has had a hip replacement – at the age of forty two. Another pal who had an operation two weeks ago will get his hip replaced in Spring. He’s forty four.

So perhaps now you see why I’m fixated with old age this week. The Forty and Fifty Something generation, who were convinced that exercise was the way to a long and healthy old age, may have been right. Our hearts are healthier, our lungs bigger and our circulation better than most. It’s just that we’re going to have to be wheeled around in chairs to show all those things off. I always expected that “Limp” would be a condition I would encounter when I get to my Seventies but I had another part of my anatomy in mind.

So what can I do? I’m going to cheer myself by having a mid life crisis and will get my hair highlighted, buy a Porsche, become friends with Ashley Cole, get sick in cabs, do drugs and join a running club. I may not live for very long, but it’s a better way to go than drowning during a girly swim on my hundredth birthday.
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TV presenter Jeremy Beadle, who died last week, was a kind man. I first came across him when he called Radio Clyde and asked to speak to me. He said he’d been driving through Glasgow and had enjoyed my show. I walked ten feet tall for weeks after that.

We met up on a few social and work occasions and were together on a friend’s stag outing to Spain for a few days where he brought a whole suitcase full of practical jokes and gags. In restaurants each night he dropped tin cards that sounded like plates smashing, and it was very entertaining to watch waiters jump out of their skins.

He was a great big kid, which was apt as many, many children are alive today because of his tireless charity work. Unlike most of us he really did make a difference.

You Give Me Fever

You don’t have to be a genius, or a fan of rolling news networks, to notice that the country is in the grip of a deadly virus right now. This epidemic makes people lose weight, feel nauseous and dizzy, take to their beds, lie in misery, shun all contact, feel unlucky and pray for respite.

The illness, known to experts as Divorce, is all consuming with feverish patients watching helplessly as the pounds drop off from their bank balances. These poor souls even have to tolerate jokes like what does a divorcée miss most about dinner parties? The invitation!

January is, according to Relate, the top month for divorce as couples who have decided to give the kids one last Happy Christmas, or who have endured festive weeks gorging on a cocktail of Toblerone, Baileys Irish Cream and their partner’s boring company, make a new year’s resolution to give up on “the vows”. With four hundred and six British marriages per day being terminated, the Divorce epidemic is striking down more people this month than at any time for the past twelve years.

But I think I have detected a theme. I can understand why so many couples were depressed, and thus divorcing, twelve years ago. 1996 was a year of disasters such as the Manchester bombings, Chinese Earthquakes, terrorist atrocities in Docklands, and the launch of The Spice Girls. It can be no coincidence that, a dozen years later, the record rate of marriage breakdown parallels so closely the reunion of Scary, Sporty, Baby, Dozy and Chav.

The celeb world they inhabit is going bananas just now - a kind of bananas split – with more break ups than they can shake their shtick at as the McCartneys, John Cleese, Britney, Marilyn Manson and others rush to say “I don’t any more”. It can only be a matter of weeks till Mattel, makers of the celebrity Barbie, release the Divorce Lawyer outfit for her and the Penniless Hobo kit for Ken.

And divorce seems to make these people say and do silly things. Sister Heather Mills of the Sisters of Perpetual Self Delusion, who has never done any wrong whatsoever in her life, would now seem to be unbalanced (insert your own, prosthetic leg, joke) whilst her oddly coiffed ex comes across as meaner than a bank manager at bonus time. As if that’s not enough, unless the ex Beatle also divorces his hairdresser, he’s soon going to have to put up with the Ginger jokes as well.

Meanwhile, John Cleese has just ended his third marriage, though the titles of his books should have given his missus a clue when they tied the knot. I’m sure she enjoyed his cheery best seller Life and How To Survive It, the snappily titled Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the hilarious What You Need To Know About Hormone Replacement Therapy, but I can’t believe she didn’t spot a theme, and run a mile, when his Living With Depression was published.

But celebs have always treated divorce as a minor inconvenience. It’s not till it hits a bit closer to your home that it really makes you sit up and take notice.

A friend of mine in the States came home from work on her husband’s fortieth birthday. She left work early as a surprise and, bearing champagne and sexy undies, arrived home to find her husband had shaved his head, added a tattoo, and thrown all her clothes out in to the yard. There had been no warning signs and she was out, replaced by his mid life crisis. Two restraining orders later, she got the divorce and has not spoken to him since.

Another friend, a fitness fanatic, decided divorce was certainly an option when he discovered the guys at the gym were all using the same exercise bike. Problem was he’d married that bike twelve years before.

I have been talking this divorce thing over with my first wife recently - she’s also my current, and only, wife but I’m taking nothing for granted. We have been seeing great friends split up at alarming rates and the only thing we’ve learned is that everyone is miserable, whether it’s the couple, children, relatives or friends.

There’s the awkwardness of wondering which of the couple to stay in touch with. Do you feel sorry for them or give them the courtesy of acting as if nothing’s happened? And how can we stop this misery happening to others? What lessons can we learn?

I thought that there should be a law brought in that you can only marry your partner after a committee of your friends has given them the once over and then taken a legally binding vote. This seemed fine till Debbie told me that if such a law had been in force fifteen years ago, her friends would never have allowed us to marry. Harsh, but fair.

However, no matter what your feelings on divorce, sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say it’s definitely the only thing to do. This week in Poland, a man slipped off to a brothel in Warsaw while his wife of fourteen years was out at work. It was his first ever visit and after checking in he discovered that the madame assigned to him looked a bit familiar. It was his wife.

I wonder if she made him pay?