An Unorthodox Means of Alleviating a Sore Throat and Booming Head Ache

It’s the last day of the year. It’s early: still dark. Why do I feel like crap? Oh flip, I’ve got a cold. The hours pass: no improvement. I’ve taken the flu remedy in the medicine cabinet. And the vitamin C drink too. There must be an alternative to sitting around feeling miserable. Look beyond the laptop. Is the rain still lashing at the windows? Are the trees in the neighbour’s garden almost bent double? Answer to both: yep. Time to uncover this then…

There’s nothing quite like manhandling a 100+ BHP muscle bike down muddy lanes, washed out city streets, and through blinding motorway road spray. Nothing. Then take some  nice photos of windswept bridges and drowning fir trees…

…before fighting your way back home – only to find your pride and joy covered in road filth…

…and discovering that your waterproofs aren’t quite as waterproof as you would have liked…

But, dammit, you feel great: ready to face the rest of the day. Throw out those pain killers: pull on those bike boots.

Poor Old Tooty!

I’m beginning to feel my age. Not only is my funny bone on hiatus – feeling lethargic in the humour department, you understand – but other things are becoming bothersome too. Woke up at 5am – feeling like shit. Tried to have shit: couldn’t. BIG PAIN. 7am finally faced the truth: not invincible: called National Health Service 111. 20 minutes later Ambulance arrives. Following an ECG and other stuff, taken here…

This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me

Following some anti-sickness stuff and a dash of morphine, it’s off to the land of nod. Miraculously (following the oft-interrupted, drug-induced, snooze) crippling pain gone. Spend rest of day being tested for everything under the sun. Eventually handed a cup of tea and a tuna sandwich and told: “If you can keep that down without it hurting, you can go home.” Went home. What was it? Who knows!

Age is Just a Number – Right?

Under normal circumstances, I’d like to answer “Yes” to that assertion/question. Surely we’re all as young as we feel; and if, on any given day, we’re feeling kinda young…then young we are. But, when truth be spoken, when I look at all those tablets that I take to maintain my eyesight, keep my feet on the end of my legs, and stop me degenerating into a basket case, I wonder. Then, when trying to push-start a stranger’s car, I fall to the ground and gash myself on the tarmac road surface; and when I slump onto the sofa following some strenuous pottering about with some seedlings in the garden; and when I stop regarding my poor old todger without rose-tinted glasses on, I begin to wonder. If I’m honest with myself, I am not the man I used to be. But then, recently, I discovered this book in a bottom drawer…

It is a collection of short stories, written in the 1960’s, by a brilliant science-fiction author, who was later to write the classic sci-fi novel ‘Ringworld‘. I bought it in the late 70’s aged 23. At the time I devoured it’s fabulous stories and snappy prose. I became an overnight Larry Niven fan, and read everything of his I could get my hands on. So, recently, forty years after reading it for the first time, I picked it up and began to read. Guess what: suddenly the decades fell away. I was 23 again – and I came to realise what age being a number really means. Our bodies may fail us miserably, but our souls don’t change. We may acquire knowledge, and probably forget a lot too; but the basic us; the indefinable something that makes us all individuals, remains unchanged – unspoiled. Thank you Larry Niven (even if your later books were all lazily-written with characters who spoke in the same voice, and whom you never bothered  to introduce before (or after) they spoke, so that your reader wondered who was saying what to whom, and in the end couldn’t give a shit – I’m thinking ‘Integral Trees’ here) you made me feel young again – which is what I’ve been all along, but just didn’t realise. Who needs a perfect cock anyway? Now which motorcycle shall I go buy myself? Gotta be a Yamaha, obviously.