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Roger Rabbits with |
It was like a flurry of ageist jabs to the solar plexus. Where it hurts. Youch!
A boxer will tell you it’s unpleasant. Causes something called phrenospasm – a convulsion of the diaphragm, with severe, sharp pain and the wind knocked from your sails.
Leaves you sucking for air. Gasping!
Fortunately for me, it was the ego, that took all the shots. But it was still a technical knockout, because I’m too old to defend myself. And because I am a delicate petal. You know – pride and vanity.
How I got into this age battle is interesting, passably interesting, or not interesting, only because it involves a cat. A manky stray whom I have never met, never will, but still have good reason to loathe. ‘George’ – we will get to George shortly.
Who’s counting?
Age has never been an issue for me because I have studiously ignored it. Even though I have used my alloted three score and ten. Plus some. But who’s counting.
If anyone had the audacity to broach age with me, I’d challenge them to a race round the block – knowing full well no-one would take up a challenge from an old man.
If I got curious aches or pains I’d stubbornly go for a two-hour bike ride or thrash the treadmill. Then if I didnt need a defibrillator, or wake in the cardio-vascular unit, I’d deem myself fit, healthy and more importantly...young-ish, and get on with stuff. Until I wasnt young-ish. And I was made to feel it.
Like the three ageist barbs I got – cruel and hurtful, but, alas, true. The first gibe came from a presumptuous whippersnapper...that I like and respect. Well, I used to!
“You can be a silly old coot sometimes,” she told me. Silly old coot? What? Really? I am undecided whether it was the caustic, taunting comment, or the very loud, mocking, young laughter that accompanied it, that hurt and offended the most.
How rude!
Silly old coot? How rude! There was peverse comfort from the fact most of the mockers probably didn’t know what a ‘coot’ was. And that she was, in fact, likening me to a very cool, distinguished, dark grey, duck-like waterbird with a large white beak called a coot. I’d buy that.
I am sure she would not have meant “silly old coot” literally. Because, by definition, a silly old coot is a foolishly eccentric, cranky, irritable and stubborn old man. And I don’t tick any of those boxes. I don’t think...
But that’s exactly what she meant because I’d been insensitive to George – that previously referred to, manky, old, unloved, stray tomcat who’d wandered into a friend’s life. ‘St Francis’ of Welcome Bay actually, felt sorry for the tom – offered him refuge, had him de-fleaed, de-wormed, de-sexed and micro-chipped, the full luxury package, at considerable expense. A noble deed. But where does it leave ‘St Francis’ if tomcat rejects his new name? What happens if his gadabout tendencies overwhelm again? And he wanders off into the sunset with some jezebel molly and not so much as a grateful meow?
I was worried about ringworm and toxoplasmosis, when I made my gaffe. I suggested, only suggested, there might have been an easier, cheaper, more practical and finite solution for the tom. Send him over the rainbow bridge. Have him put down. Oh dear! The outrage! “Sometimes you’re a silly old coot”, harrumphed and mocked the whippersnapper.
Archaic
Then sometime later we were discussing partial eclipses of the sun, and how using a ‘colander’ as a pinhole camera was a fun and safe way of viewing the cosmic phenomenon.
“Cullander or cullender,” I corrected. “A ‘u’ or an ‘e’ but not an ‘a’,” I corrected. “No! Colander with an ‘a’,” she recorrrected. Moments later, after consulting with lexicographer Dr Google, she said: “That figures – your spellings appear in older texts. They’re old fashioned, rare, archaic”.
So it wasn’t about spelling, it was about age.
Then I was then chatting with a doctor. Not so much chat because chat implies a friendly casual exchange of thoughts and ideas. In fact I was paying him handsomely to listen to my groans. Because something wasn’t working, something had fallen off, or something else needed CRC. Age-related issues you just want fixed but don’t want to discuss.
Dodgy knees
I just wanted him to reach into his drawer of potions and offer me a vial of J.M.Barrie elixir – magic stuff that kept Peter Pan flying longer than an Airbus A350, blessed him with agelessness. But it didn’t happen.
“Well you’re not a young man anymore,” he mused. Excuse me?
And the dodgy knees? “They’ll tell you when to stop jogging!”
That was it. This doddery old goat grabbed his mortally-wounded ego and shuffled out and off.