And another thing about being 60

When you're fifty, SAGA (Social Activities for the Golden Age) send you a birthday card and invite you to partake in the lifestyle determined by them for the more genteel years, and buy their insurance. Though (see my last bletherings) with sixty being the new forty I expect that a delightful tour of the Amish communities has metamorphosed into a trip to Vegas hosted by Hunter S.

When you're sixty the NHS (National Health Service) write to you and ask you to participate in the Bowel Cancer Screening Programme, then a week later they send you a different sort of card, and instructions, fortunately not illustrated, and an envelope lined with waterproof foil, rather like those ones that were used to transport floppies (no comment), only in this case a deliquescent floppy.

So to sum up, at fifty you're invited to participate in a cruise, and at sixty you're invited to participate in a game of poo sticks.

Time passes.

As I stared at the huge front moving in from the Southwest I was struck by a thought, so turning from the mirror, I sat on the bed and contemplated my socks, they were like me, a trifle faded, slightly threadbare, but otherwise serviceable. On Christmas Eve I had become sixty...."Sixty - it's the new forty!" said my friends (the majority on the wrong side of fifty five), so what does this mean? It possibly means a mid-life crisis extending for another twenty years sauced with an existential/thanatophobic crisis due to the certain knowledge that the end of existence is coming a step closer (especially if you buy that motorbike), i.e. it's all downhill from here.
However, this vertiginous career to the grave/furnace is now tempered with inappropriate mid-life anxieties: should one start, not, or stop, looking at girls. How old is "too old" for a floral shirt, or have you passed the point where anyone cares how you look? Slippers - retro, anathema, essential? Flirt, Charmer or Dirty Old Man? This was all proving too much - I put my shoes on.