70

70 GIFfrom 70 GIFs

Once I was seventeen but now I am seventy. The two words sound similar but they are fifty three years apart. I am delighted that I made it this far. There were times when reaching seventy seemed like a  wishful dream because my father and several male members of my extended family died in their sixties - just like my brothers Paul and Simon.

And thinking of another Paul and Simon, Paul Simon in fact - he was twenty four years old when he wrote "Old Friends" which was recorded for the 1968 album - "Bookends". He imagines old men sitting on a park bench like book ends and of course the song contains the famous line, "How terribly strange to be seventy".

I concur.

The seventeen year old boy that I was never  really considered what it might be like to be old - sitting on a park bench looking back. It seemed so far off that it was like the farthest planet in the solar system - Neptune - which is 2,703 billion miles from Earth.

But now I am here at 70 entering the last phase of my life. My health is pretty good and in that sense I have nothing much  to complain about - yet! Who knows? Maybe I will make it to eighty. The official life expectancy for a British man is now 80.9 years and I have not smoked since I was 34 years old and I do not live in Glasgow where the life expectancy for a man is just 56 years.

Of course I have already met my lovely granddaughter Phoebe with two more grandchildren to meet this very month. The baton has been duly passed and through them little parts of me will be carried into a future that I shall not see. It's a kind of immortality. Of my four blood grandparents, I only met my maternal grandmother. My father only met one of his five grandchildren before he died.

At seventy, it's getting too late to follow the whimsical dreams of youth. You have to be realistic and tick off the dreams you can achieve without beating yourself up about those that have effectively slipped away like the fish I tried to catch with my bare hands in a crystal clear stream long ago. They're gone.

I shall keep walking and reading as long as I can, cooking food, taking pictures, writing poems, blogging, enjoying good films and TV drama, just relishing being alive. It's all I've got. Happy Birthday To Me! And many thanks to all those kind-hearted bloggers who have already wished me a happy birthday - you know who you are.