Passage of time - where have the years gone?

Last weekend we went to a friends 50th birthday party, the fourth or fifth one that we have been to in the last couple of years (not including our own).

It's a mark of getting older how much more quickly time goes, I think. It doesn't seem so long ago that I was forty, and I can easily remember being in my thirties which I think for me was my best decade. I had a bit of money, a decent job, more confidence and experience to better deal with life than in my twenties, no encumbrances (children, huge mortgage etc) and the whole world seemed to be in front of me. To be forty or fifty seemed a very long lifetime away. People that age were old!

It's cliche, but I don't know where the years have gone. Mentally, I still feel the same as I did when I was thirty, but I do have to admit the old body is letting me down a bit. You will all know, if you read this regularly, about my problems with my back and my knees; I also have to wear glasses to read and have had an operation on my nose. Not, as rude people amongst you may thing, to have it made smaller, although that would have been nice (I did ask them to shave off a bit while they were at it, but the consultant declined even with an offer of ready money), but to straighten a deviated septum which was giving me blocked sinuses.

And I seem to get busier as I get older. I thought that in your fifties you were supposed to be able to slow down a bit and do more of the things that you enjoy instead of the things which you are obliged to do, but perhaps these days that's a luxury which our parents took for granted but which we cannot afford.

They do say that fifty is the new forty, so maybe I should relax about it and just get on with it. When I think back to my mother at fifty, she had grey hair in a granny perm, had the mental outlook of a ninety year old (but then she'd had that since she was twenty herself) and wore crimplene and cardigans, a truly style free zone. Most fifty years olds of my acquaintance now (and some sixty and seventy year olds) dress well, look after their hair - ie it isn't grey and it isn't permed -  and have a very young outlook; we bear no resemblence to the fifty year olds of previous generations.

I don't feel old, and I'm determined not to be old. That poem which says "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple, and a hat which doesn't go" sums it up perfectly for me. It doesn't matter how old you actually are, it's how old you feel and think which is important. So in my head I'm still thirty, not fifty, and I will be for a long time. I have previously blogged about the reasons I still feel young, and I intend to hang on to them as long as possible.

The good thing about being older is that it gives you the confidence to know that being older doesn't matter. Life is for living, so go out there and enjoy it, and the rest of them can go hang if they don't like it!