I Demand a Recount

Right then.  ‘Time’s winged chariot’ definitely says that I am now 61 and I’m not prepared to call it a liar. And yet, and yet!

I am fairly sure that I am, in reality, still somewhere between 17 and 25 and that it’s all been a horrible mistake.  Most of the time this is just a vague feeling that floats around in my mind, but, every so often, it comes to the fore.

Take three weeks ago. I am lucky enough to have close friends from University of Embra days who we go away with at least once a year. No changes in personnel. All still married to the same people and all still friends.  Been doing it for 30 years now. Rules are a castle, a river, a cathedral and approximate equidistance between the Great Wen and Embra. First one was in York and we go back there every  10 years.

York again this year, courtesy of Mrs M, the designated organiser this time. Kids have  all flown nests and most of us have retired. So, a full complement of the 27 of us (Wee Jim never got married).  In the old days, we used to take over an hotel and go wildish. These days, we prefer a wee bit comfort and tranquillity.

Thus it was that we were booked into a Best Western hotel near the Monk Bar. All prepared for a staid and respectable, if far from sober weekend when I saw this sign in the bathroom:-

It’s 1 am on a Saturday morning.  The swine have shut the bar on us, even although we are residents. I  know that most of the hotel is occupied by WI members and spouses who are having some sort of conference that weekend. This was clearly an opportunity that might never come again.  I check our toiletry supplies and there is nary an aerosol to be had. I blame my wife for being a bit green but it’s probably just as well.

Every so often that weekend  I toyed with the idea of nipping into Boots to buy an aerosol of some sort, just to see what would have happened.  In the end, I failed the Lady MacBeth test by not  ‘Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would” ‘.

So, maybe I am 61 after all. It’s a worry.

18 thoughts on “I Demand a Recount”

  5. Whoops!

    Just for the avoidance of doubt, I share my birthday with Marie Osmond, Paul Simon, Edwina Currie, the blessed Margaret T. and John Snow (‘The Hammer of the Aussies’).

    So that’s the 13th and, as it happens, 13 days ago. Would have posted this earlier but I succumbed to an old rugby injury about 10 days ago and have only just managed to crawl my way back to the PC in the last couple of days. Thanks for the birthday wishes anyway! Too kind.

  6. Re- still somewhere between 17 and 25
    Right Brain’s most withering comment to me in my sixties, is, “You are not the babe magnet you once thought you were, Dear!” It is the “thought” that I find particularly cutting…

  7. Belated Happy Birthday. 🙂 Hope you are fully recovered…

    I demand a recount every year. Actually, I am far more likely to buy that aerosol now than I would have done at seventeen…

  9. You should have dispensed with them years ago.
    First the birthdays went, then everyone else’s birthdays then Christmas and Thanksgiving.
    For some curious reason I still send a few Christmas cards and a cheque to the dogs home.
    Apart from that ‘f’ ’em all and curiously liberating, try it!
    I still feel like Methuselah though, always have and always will.

  12. When the fire alarm went off at a school I taught at, a girls’ boarding school, and we all piled out of the classrooms into chapel for a head count, and the Fire Brigade arrived all lights and sirens, it was generally found that the cause was hair-spray, deodorant or burning toast in one of the boarding houses. You wouldn’t really have hoicked everyone out of bed in your hotel, would you, JM?

    Belated birthday wishes anyway.

  13. One of the problems of growing up in a Scottish nobleman’s palace, is that one develops delusions of grandeur. For six years of my early life I was incarcerated at a Victorian preparatory boarding school, which had moved from a castle in Midlothian, to the Earl of Melville’s edifice in Fife.
    (http://www.arc-architects.com/downloads/Melville-House-Historical-Information-Abridged.pdf)
    It was sold recently I saw as the most expensive home in Scotland! To get back to the point: fire drills involved us as seven year olds, jumping out of the top floor windows, with a sort of contraption like a canvas wide belt round our chests, attached to a geared mechanism, which in theory went more slowly the heavier you were. We were given strict instructions to keep our arms down by our sides, or we would slip out of the canvas webbing, and plummet three floors to the ground. How we weren’t all permanently scarred by the experience, I don’t know, and there certainly was not any Health and Safety BS within a million miles of hte place. Eventually we found the drills to be rather fun, so many a happy match was lit and placed under the primitive fire detection points to trigger another jump!
    I took my wife back to visit several years ago, to find it largely unchanged, although the children seemed to be bigger than the 7-13 year olds of my day. The Headmaster, for that is what I took him for, delegated a lad to show us round. He seemed surprised that I knew my way round already. I explained that I had spent six years there from the early 1950s. He looked vastly impressed. I discovered that it had become a Borstal for young offenders, and he must have wondered what crime I had committed to justify such a long term of imprisonment…

  14. Happy birthday John. Yup that notice is just *inviting* trouble. I love it that you and your former Uni pals are still meeting up. I think my son no2 will be like that – only his oldest pals date back to toddler group!

    I’m a bit older than you, then. I’m 27. 😀

  15. It’s all in the mind this age thing, that’s what I keep telling myself, trouble is the body I live in has other ideas as various bits begin to give in to gravity, whither, fade, fail to function as they used to and one bit in particular that used to stand proudly to attention to watch me shave now hangs limply down to watch me tie my shoe laces..
    But talking of hotel evacuations, many years ago MrsOMG and I were ensconced on an absoloutely rippingly filthy weekend whwn she took a bath before putting on the war paint and going for dinner. I was reclining on the water bed wobbling in the breeze fom the A/C unit when the most ear splitting screech erupted from the fire alarm, followed by another screech from the bathroom, I raced in to find MrsOMG pointing at something fizzing and crackling in the bath water. She explianed that at the precise moment the ‘Bath Bomb’, a smelly ball of gunk that flavours your bath water in an exciting and playful way, hit the water, the fire alarm went off and she was convinced that she had caused the alarm with the BB. Quickly donning a thong, I swept her into my arms and carted her down the fire escape, returning a few minutes later to get her dressing gown, she did giggle a bit as she found herself surrounded by big, beefy firemen and not being a shy girl made the best of it. She still gets a Christmas Card from Blue Watch every year.

  16. OMG, take comfort. You can still tie your laces! Was it another case of ‘just a thong at twilight’ for those intrepid fire-fighters?

Add your Comment