Time flies!

We are almost a week into September, and it’ll soon be Christmas!

This coming weekend is the read through for panto (oh, yes it is!). I am hoping for a good turn out; it’s a great script, we’ve picked some cracking music and the annual pantomime is for me the highlight of the theatre’s calendar. It will be colourful, noisy and hectic, and gone in a flash (literally, as far as the Genies are concerned!).

It’s unbelievable that we have got to the panto season already, though. It seems not long ago that I was away at Easter and not even considering the niceties of rehearsal schedules, community songs and the appropriate dimensions of a dancer’s bra top.

Someone once told me that the older you get the quicker the time passes and that certainly seems to be true. Each year it seems to go quicker and quicker, and events creep up on us and pass more swiftly than the year before. Of course that can’t be the case, after all 24 hours is always going to be the same 24 hours lengthwise or worldwide chaos would ensue, but it does seem like it and I don’t know what to do to slow it down. At this rate, in another few years things will have finished before they have begun!

Mentally, I don’t feel any older than I did in my late twenties. I think I make better, more considered and less judgemental decisions now and my experience in dealing with other people and situations means I do things differently, but in my mind I am still slightly alternative and non conformist. In reality, I am probably a typical middle England Tory living in an increasingly unrealistic fantasy world. But the real difference is in my physical capacity, which is definitely reduced.

I went to bed at 8.30pm the other night. The combination of dieting (which saps your energy anyway), extra walking with the dog (actually all walking with the dog is extra because I didn’t do any walking at all before) and just the pace of life are getting the better of me. I am looking decidedly haggard, or at least I think I am. The Hubby, bless him, always tells me I look beautiful but he’s a consummate liar about that sort of thing and will say anything to make me feel better (ie stop me whinging) so I have to take it with a pinch of salt (either that or he really thinks so, in which case he’s deluded and should be committed).

Does everyone feel like this? Or have I been unlucky and allowed myself to get into an unfit, overweight and isolated state and my chickens are coming home to roost?

If other people feel like it they don’t let on, so perhaps I just don’t have any backbone and ought to pull my socks up and have a stiff upper lip (a few slightly confused metaphors there, but you get the drift). I’ve always been a cope-er, but at the moment I feel like I’m sinking. Or maybe this is the state that everyone goes through when they try and do something about their health and get fitter, because doing exercise knackers you and then you don’t have any energy for anything else until you are fit enough not to need to do the exercise in the first place? It’s always been one of life’s paradoxes that the more you exercise, eventually the more energy you have.

I’ve obviously got some way to go! And lets hope that I don’t arrive before I’ve set off.