JUST HAVE A GOOD CHRISTMAS.
Apropos age.
My Leader recently remarked, when I was ranting about some (probably innocuous) thing or another, that she hoped I would never suffer from dementia because that would make me quite impossible to deal with.
She was right.
Age has not mellowed me nor the years contained. Dylan Thomas would never have exhorted me: "Do not go gentle into that good night."
I sometimes wonder why. I think I'm an affable enough old guy. Could it just be peevish senility? I hope not: don't particularly rue growing old; have always considered it better than the alternative.
It is not personal involvement in the almighty mess brought about by us and other interfering nations in the Middle East, either: our country only sells the cluster bombs, nobody is raining them down on us yet. And it is not seasonal affective disorder, that's for sure: thus far the season here has been delightfully unwintry.
So what, then?
Could it be because, insidiously, many of the things I have always taken for granted have either changed or disappeared?
The UK financially owes a bloody fortune to the world and his wife (don't ask who or what is to blame for that). The last of the mines has closed. The steel business is drifting away. Many respected family concerns have gone. Branch banks and shops long since went to the wall. The post office has become a counter in the local grocery store and the car industry is mostly in foreign hands.
Or could it be more to do with the niggling upsurge of foul-mouthed 'attitude' that seems to have crept into this nation since the twenty first century began?
Whatever it is:
I don't like it Which means I shall do what I invariably do when I don't like something and have nobody I can reasonably blame for it: I shall blame gun totin' America, the land of the rising lawsuit.
Well it really hasn't been much of a year, has it.
As happens when you are old:
Several personally cherished people have died and others have required hospital treatment for cancer. At least a couple of the latter are responding very favourably to current treatment and they, praise be, will surely have A Merry Christmas.
I can only wish the same to you and combine with it the wish that you will have A Happy New Year.
Will depend on how immersed I have become in the rewriting of my long ago shelved children's book The Badgers of Deep Wood and whether, simultaneously, I have begun work on a crime story containing at least one character I have been promising introduction to the printed word for over seventy years.
Go carefully!
There are a lot of clowns out there.
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