Evening Strumpets,
As I was walking along the path to My Mother in Law`s house on Christmas Day just gone, I took a moment to look around and have a bit of a reflection on what this Christmas meant to me. The snow lay on the Ground, my breath misted causing a fluorish of crystaline as I exhaled, and the Sky was the blue God saw when he breathed life into the clay.
This was to be my Fourth Christmas since Mam died, and possibly (in fact very probably) the last Christmas the kids would both really experience the real "magic" of the Day. I figured it was about the third Christmas Morning on which I had woken to discover a white Christmas in my life. Then I thought, so how many haven`t I? And that`s when it hit me.
I had experienced (in one form or another) forty Christmas Day`s in my lifetime.
Now if you`re of an age where you`re tutting and thinking, "forty, you`re nowt but a bairn lad" then apologies, but what you have to realise is that somewhere there has been a mistake. You see, I`m actually only 22. Possibly 25 at a push. I`ve only just left Senior school, about seven months ago. Nearly forty? Christ I must have missed that meeting.
As an aside, it is with great pleasure that I tell you that My Senior/ secondary school was called Hustler. Yes that`s right, I gathered my fundamental understanding of French/English Literature/Music and Maths from a School named after a porno Mag. We shared a Campus with Readers Wives 6th form, Razzle & Fiesta technical College and St Bizarre Sex Dwarves.
That`s not really true. but my school was called Hustler.
How on earth am I Forty this year? Where`s that time gone? More importantly, how do I get it back? My neighbour has a theory of time speeding up the older you get. He has a four year old Grandson. A year to the little lad is a quarter of his life. It`s a 70th of the old boys.
Somebody once described our time on Earth to me as being like a toilet roll. The nearer you get to the end, the narrower the roll, the quicker it goes. you can insert your own toilet gag`s here. Go on I`ll wait for you..........right, are you done? OK, shall we carry on.
Then of course I think about where I`m at. I`m nearly Forty. I`ll have outlived Jesus by eight years (and a fact which even the most ardent of atheists cannot dispel, I`ve helped create two miracles in my lifetime). I`ll be the same age as Lennon when he was asked if he would sign Chapman`s copy of Double fantasy. I`ll be the same age as Basil Fawlty (In the SECOND SERIES). Dad hadn`t met me when he was forty (though he didn`t know it then, I was having a ball of a time: Bdumtisch Aaaythenkyew), and Mam had known me for about a year, inside and out.
But then I think, if I could have seen myself now being forty when I was twenty, apart from thinking when did I find the time to eat all those pies, would I be happy? If I could see me with my amazingly beautiful family, doing what I do for a living, Living where I do, still in touch with my closest friends of nearly thirty years, and their equally amazing and beautiful families (well nearly as amazing and beautiful). If I could see me doing the gigs and festivals, even playing a bloody banjo, then? Well, I think I`d have been pretty damned happy.
Here`s a song which I hope sums it up. (Man I looked pretty good with that beard).
Till the next one, learn something new,
Mark.
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