Old age doesn’t arrive suddenly. You don’t wake up one Monday morning to find your knees have stopped working, your hair has turned pure white or dropped out and that you can’t remember where you put your spectacles. A bit like dusk or a receding forehead. It’s more of a gradual thing.
In my own head, I’m still 25. I can still go out with friends and enjoy a glass of beer or two without falling over. I can still eat my own body weight in steak and lobster at The Palm or the fresh fish from Dukes in Malibu and stay up socializing til late – I’m often the last to leave the party and it’s only when the hosts turn the lights off that I get the hint that it’s perhaps time to leave. But what’s more, I like doing these things.
I find “immature” movies such as Daddy’s Home or Anchorman really funny and I still laugh out loud at Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation despite seeing this at least a dozen times each Christmas time since it’s release 30 years ago. I muck about with my 5-year-old daughter loads that my wife often questions who is the elder one of the two. I try to remain as active as possible but with running this business, I find it hard to find the time to play the sports I used to love like Rugby. I still swim a bit and I reckon I can still ski, although my mates from the UK will negate this claim after I met up with them in January for a skiing trip in Colorado.
However, last week whilst I was on Malibu beach with my wife and daughter watching a group of surfers ride the waves, I had a Eureka moment of a couple of years back that perhaps I was out of the summer months and heading towards the autumnal months and that the leaves have started to fall off the tree of life and the days were getting shorter whilst the nights were getting longer.
Two years ago this week, we were on an island of the Greek mainland, it had a similar coastline to Malibu although the June Gloom was certainly absent. The sun was shining and after a lovely Greek lunch and a bottle of their finest local beer, I thought it would be an excellent idea to join in with the others on the beach in the ten-foot waves. They looked like they were having a riot, diving under the giant breakers and emerging on the other side, squealing with delight.
So, to the amusement of everyone on the beach, who’d thought until that point that I was some sort of stranded sea creature, I ran into the water and dived into the first wave. I’m not sure exactly what happened next but my head was concertinaed into my shoulders and my right arm felt like it had followed the example of my swimming shorts and fallen off.
My wife suggested I should try the rather more leisurely pursuit of bodyboarding. As you all know, it’s sort of like surfing, only you lie down and who on earth wouldn’t like that.
The technique is quite simple. After the wave has broken, you are transported, almost ejected into the air to ride the wave back onto the beach in great comfort, all the time whilst laying on a piece of polystyrene.
Well!! Not quite – not when you’re my age, you aren’t.
As the wave started to break, I leaped up on to the board which, because I’m a little bit chunky shall we say, I sank immediately to the bottom of the seabed, which is where I lay as the wave removed my swimming shorts again. And this time my left arm.
It’s so sad. I don’t feel old but my body is a little too heavy and too brittle these days to cash the checks my inner mid-twenties something is writing.
Seeing how upset this made me, my wife offered to take me on at croquet, a sport which requires roughly the same amount of effort as snoozing in a deckchair and a tiny fraction more than actually being dead.
Nothing could go wrong. And nothing did, for about four and a half minutes, when my back gave way.
So the next day after a long sleep, we went for a cycle ride, which was fine, but only because I had to push the bike up all the hills, and then, because the saddle had broken my tailbone, I had to push it down the other side again.
After the first bum-breaking hundred yards, I never really got on it at all.
We are told when we start pushing 50 that we need to become active, that we need to face the coming of the night with fresh air in our lungs and a bead of sweat on our forehead. I’m not even 45 (just), so this should be easy, right? No. It’s not.
Which is why I’m glad right now to be back from the beach, writing this. Because when I’m sitting at a laptop with a mug of coffee, there are no reminders at all that I’m getting old.
Now, whilst we don’t all like to admit these things, they do happen. We all like to do so much and cram so much in but as we get older, we have slightly less energy to do the things we like doing but end up spending our time on things like cleaning. And whilst we are doing the monotonous task of cleaning our house, we have little to no energy or time left to get out and enjoy the great outdoors that the Conejo Valley or Malibu has to offer.
Who, in all honesty would prefer to be bent over on their hands and knees on a Saturday morning scrubbing their shower clean or vacuuming their house instead of hiking up in the Santa Monica Mountains or laying flat out on Malibu beach watching the hilarious sight of a strange 40 something year old British Guy trying to master the art of Body Boarding.
I know which I’d prefer. And it isn’t cleaning my shower.
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