Day 53

When I limped back into the house last night after cricket training, I said to M and A that it really was time to think about retiring because it felt like my body just couldn’t cope any more. My glute felt like it was about to rip again, my calf felt strained, and my Achilles was very tender – and all in my left leg. A, who’s really our resident sports scientist, told me it was normal, that I was using muscle groups I’d not used for almost a year, that I’ve not been in winter training for at least 5 years. I just harrumphed at the rationality of it all, and sick of the seeming decline my aging is bringing me. But then I had to admit to myself that the other newbie who was there last week and again this week, S, who’s actually really half my age, said that he’d not been able to move for two days after last week’s exertions, so maybe, just maybe, I will persevere. And I have to admit that, although there are more pains in more places this morning, they don’t seem as bad as last week (or even last night). Driving home in the wet dark yesterday thinking of stopping was miserable, orange echoes off the streets, clinically straight roads, indistinct speed limit markers, and the dread at perhaps having to age gracefully rather than the hoped-for disgracefully.

I have an optician’s appointment today. It’s over two years since I had my eyes tested. They have changed, I do too much screen work, despite the fact that I use my notebook. There are days when I’m staring at the screen for well over 12 hours. It can’t be changed. There is a time imperative to get all my ideas out of my head into some sort of readable format before my brain gives in, too. Even if I live to the age I want to live to (125), time is running out. I don’t want to waste those electrical impulses that are still firing, and were actually conflagrating when I watched the last 70 minutes of a programme about the ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor last night after M and A had gone to bed, and, as usual when I do something in the evenings, I couldn’t switch off the adrenaline, nor the neurons, nor the neurotransmitters. I scribbled lots of notes into my phone because I didn’t have the strength to get up to get my scribble journal from the dining room table without losing my thoughts.

The moon, part of it amputated by its cycle, was huge again last night. I photograph it a lot, but can never get the right picture.

We are eternally striving. That’s as it should be. First World pains are as nothing in the context of all worlds.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 10