Daft Old Duffer is back with his weekly column. A touching piece today that may spark some inner reflection for us all. Ed
My body let me down today.
I was walking up a slope-much too shallow a rise to be named a hill – when I was informed by my body that I needed to stop.
“What’s going on?” demanded my twenty year old brain. “I’ve strolled his way many times before and hardly noticed the tilt in the path. And only yesterday I was out on my bike, pedalling lustily away and congratulating myself on how fit I was for my age!”
It was no use, my heart was pounding, my breath panting and my thigh muscles trembling. And I was so achingly tired all I wanted to do was lay down for a while, right there and rest.
Sudden realisation
I was suddenly one of those old ‘uns you find stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, or in a shop doorway, smiling apologetically at you as you edge past yet making no attempt, apparently, to get out of your busy way.
I’m truly grateful that at an age when my father and grandfather were long dead, I’m still able to eat with my own teeth and put my pants on without falling over. But the downside is the frequent and yet always unexpected reminders that it won’t go on for ever.
Ghostly lavs
Thanks for all those responses to my last week’s piece.
Like many of you, I particularly warmed to Cynic’s vision of a derelict public loo forever haunted by the ghost of a certain local politician.
I suppose the whole tale could be a horror story. It wouldn’t take much embroidering of the truth.
