Very tired!

I feel exhausted. I am definitely getting old.

We had a busy time last weekend doing chores on Saturday, then preparing for a social event in the evening, attending and helping clear up, then on Sunday completing the tiling for the bathroom floor in the pouring rain (the tile cutter had to go outside because of the mess and all the water it chucks out when it is operating).  

My back and knees are protesting at having spent all day Sunday getting up and down onto a hard floor and carrying stuff up and down the stairs, and I am not sleeping well due my age and, I regret to say, my hormones.

All this is making me very tired during the day and meaning I am not really focused on my work and not getting through it at the rate I need to if I am to meet my deadlines. And what’s worse is that I am now so tired I don’t care.

I used to think the getting old and tired thing was a myth and it was how you felt in your head that mattered. If you felt young and lively, then you could keep going physically so long as you were in a reasonable condition of fitness. Possibly that is the problem, in that I have been a couch potato for so long now and over indulged in things I know aren’t good for me and it’s a long road back.

I also have to say that work is a nightmare. Not necessarily the people (although they have their moments and life would be a lot easier if I didn’t have any staff with their personal baggage) but the pressure now to do the same or more with less resource. Many people would say that I am lucky to still be in a job and maybe they’re right, but at times it doesn’t seem worth it.

God knows how our generation and those yet to come are going to cope with working until their late sixties or longer, if we are tired of it all in our early fifties. Surely it can’t be right to put a 68 or 69 year old in front of a class of unruly and rowdy teenagers or entrust them with the medical care of someone in a life threatening condition? I know that not all old people lose their marbles and many of them are perfectly capable of doing complex work even into their seventies and eighties, but physical robustness and memory isn’t the same at 68 as it was at 48, and that is impossible to deny. Even with someone fit, healthy and active, things do slow down and deteriorate to a degree.

I can’t help feeling that we will all be working much later and as a consequence having much shorter retirements not just because we are older but because we will all be more worn out with the extra years of work. Our children’s generation will be even harder hit, since at least some of us have protected benefits and have had a few years of decent pay to put something by. They will be so poor with the cost of everything and continuing economic decline they will be even worse off.

It is 2.30pm, and I feel like going home and lying down with my moggies for a good two hour sleep. I know this feeling will pass, and in an hour or so I will feel better, but just at the moment that seems a wonderful idea. They don’t have a sleeping room at the Town Hall – perhaps I’ll suggest it. I bet there would be a queue!

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!

Ten ways I know I'm getting old

1. Policemen, firemen, doctors and other men in uniform look too young for me

2. I like listening to Radio 2, and find myself moaning about the departure of Terry Wogan

3. My daughter asks me where I am going or where I have been and will I be alright, like she's my mother!

4. I shout at people on TV when I think they are wankers.

5. I won't allow anyone to watch 'Big Brother' because I have 'standards'.

6. I drink cocoa in the evening.

7. I am becoming even more clumsy. If there is something to drop, break, trip over or fall down, I will do it.

8. I talk about things 'in the 80s' as though it were yesterday.

9. I belong to the National Trust and honestly enjoy visiting their properties.

10. I have numerous aches and pains where I didn't have them ten years ago.

Getting too old?

I'm definitely getting too old. For life in general, and in particular for energetic pantomimes. First pre dress today, another tomorrow, and then two dress rehearsals, night off Thursday and then into a 10 performance run, with the first five performances in the first weekend.

By next Sunday night I shall be on my knees. It'll be home, a bath, cocoa and bed. I know I am sounding ancient, but the days of going out to party after every performance are long over and I just know I shall be a wreck, particularly as the first performance will be to over 230 very vocal brownies, cubs, beavers and rainbows. I can't really complain; after all I am a volunteer, the adrenalin will get me though and when I'm up on that stage I shall love it. But at the present moment, I am looking forward to it with dread. 

It's a very odd thing, this amdram compulsion. People ask you why you do it and to be honest, I'd have to admit I do it for a certain amount of artistic satisfaction but mainly for the applause. Applause makes you feel good, gives you a buzz and sends you out on a high. I've taken some time off for the show because it's impossible to come home and go to bed at a sensible time then go to work the next day and perform to my employer's required standard; my mind is going round and round, revisiting what could have been better, remembering memorable moments or hilarious cock-ups. I will need to watch trash telly until at least midnight if not later before I even try to sleep.

Not all went smoothly tonight and there are one or two things to change tomorrow but overall I think we should all be pleased with ourselves. What we need now is our audience to clap, laugh, shout abuse and cheer. They will lift us up from the mundane and run-of-the-mill to something much better.  As things like costumes, props, lights, the band etc are added, I can always feel my own performance lifting and the audience completes it.

So now, fairly ludicrously early, I'm off to bed to get some sleep before the busyness of the week ahead. At least that's the plan. It takes a lot of energy to go out on stage and terrify children every night - it's not easy you know - and us villains need our beauty sleep!