Youthful armpits

I may be old but I have...

Last Saturday

Finally got a chance to post some pictures from the surprise trip to London that Katrina organised last Saturday to celebrate my birthday.

This is the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, with the tube slides that Katrina thought would be a good way to celebrate my youth! We got tickets to go down the tallest (five storeys high) which was such good fun - especially discovering that if you sing a note the joints in the tube make it come out of the bottom as a strange ululation that gets nearer and nearer...

Life begins at 6.30am

I had a nice day yesterday, played on the computer for a bit (Benjamin bought me Might and Magic IX, but I want to complete the last level of M&M VIII first, so I have a few more monsters to kill and some odd levers and locked doors to try and sort out), had a haircut, had an excellent bacon and brie baguette at the the bakery in Park Gate, did a little light shopping and then came home for birthday tea. Once the younger children had gone to bed we started watching Munich but by about 10.30 we were too tired and turned it off. The only disappointment of the day was that Daniel's laptop came back from Medion with the screen working but with no wireless connection and with a return of the old problem that the battery won't charge from the mains. (I never did get a reply to my complaint.) I went out and bought a new Netgear wireless card which also failed to work. There seems to be a conflict between the Netgear software and the standard Windows wireless networking setup (huge thanks to Alex, who came for birthday cake and then spent ages trying to sort this for me), despite not having a problem with a Netgear wireless PC card elsewhere on my network. In the end I gave up, and we may resort to Daniel checking there's nothing on there he wouldn't want to lose, and then we'll try restoring the factory settings. If that makes the software work, we'll look at the prices of new batteries; if not, we'll have an expensive paperweight.

Anyway, I'm trying to get into the habit of treating each day as a gift from God, a fresh start and chance to do things well. I doubt I'll succeed fully every day, but it's worth a try. And I have my first session with the hypnotherapist today, so it seems like a good time to embrace the possibility of change.

It's my birthday

Which is, of course, a good thing. Why does it take a day that's all about me to remind me that a life that's happy, a life that's fulfulling, a life that's well-lived is not a life that's all about me?

I just opened my first e-card of the day, from Katrina, which made me laugh till I cried. The reason to celebrate is not that I'm a particular age, but that I'm alive at all.

Thirtysomething

Today is my last day of being thirtyanything; I don't feel quite as bad as I did but I'm still feeling kind of hopeless and what's-the-pointish. I'm at work today, having had two days off with stomach cramps and diarrhoea, and I'm looking at all the various stuff I've got to do and thinking how little I care about it. I'm sure that I can talk myself into seeing that doing these things will be useful for someone; it's just that my main (or only) motivation is to not get sacked because we need the money. I'm not sure how long it's possible to sustain working in a job that (a) I don't care about and (b) makes me feel physically sick with anxiety when I come into the building. I had a plan to try and earn money from creative writing, and once I had found someone who would pay me, to give up some hours in this job to have more time to write, etc; unfortunately I'm too busy/tired/miserable to get on with the writing, meaning that that plan may be a non-starter.

I'm going to see a hypnotherapist on Friday, who was recommended by my chiropractor; we'll see if his optimism is justified - he reckons he can have me feeling more positive in 5 or 6 sessions. Maybe just getting past the 40 barrier tomorrow will help; I've got a list of things I'd like to achieve, though I'm struggling to believe that I'll ever turn them from "things I'd like to do" to "things I've done".

40

So now I'm counting the days I have left: 20 days (including today) of being thirtysomething. This is the first birthday I've ever had that I've not wanted to celebrate. I wasn't looking forward much to 30, but I had a party (probably the first successful party I ever organised) and in the end it was OK. But now it feels as though my life is ending. I know that this is partly because I'm feeling a bit miserable, and I know that plenty of people have achieved things when they're older than 40 - I am, by the way, finding it increasingly hard not to slap people who say "Life begins at 40" - and I'm sure that the day after my birthday I'll wake up and do exactly the same things as I did the day before my birthday, but nonetheless I can't help feeling that that's it: life is over, from now on it's simply existing. I'm not likely to start a new career, despite the fact that I have longer to work before 65 than I have worked since I was 18; I'll continue to be adequate at some things, but I'm unlikely now to ever excel in anything; all the aches and pains I have now will most likely either continue or get worse, rather than improve or disappear; my thoughts about God's plan for my life are complex but usually come down to an assumption that he wants me to just do the best I can, where I am, with what I've got and I'm not doing very well so far.