second childhood

Old age. I’m getting there, as the British rail ads used to say. In my aunt’s house I picked up a magazine clearly targeted at the elderly - there was an article on deep vein thrombosis and all the personals were under the heading ‘friendship’. A woman in her sixties described herself as ‘nice to look at’ (‘unpleasant to touch’ was the unwritten implication), while an elderly man requested ‘genuine ladies only’. Was he being an old-fashioned gent, or had he had his fill of pre-op transsexuals? I prefer to think it was the latter.

Not that I’m losing touch with the Zeitgeist. Only that morning I’d been lying in bed staring vacantly at some CBeebies programme trying to teach me the ‘Funky Monkey’, a dance in imitation (or, perhaps, gleeful mockery) of our primate cousins. ‘Have you got that?’, the male presenter asked the female one after he’d demonstrated it about fifty times. ‘Yes we have!’, she said (the lack of irony is astounding). ‘You were great!’, this woman gushed at the camera as the programme ended. That’s what we need, TV that congratulates you for lying in bed doing nothing.

Then I switched over to T4: a competition asking ‘budding writers’ to finish a scene from Hollyoaks. It was hard to think of anything that didn’t involve a drive-by shooting or localized thermonuclear explosion. I’m meant to be creative, but it isn’t easy. Mat has been setting the occupants of the house artistic tasks in the hope that the household will become an ‘art movement’. The first was a self portrait. I chose a medium suited to my capabilities - only genuine Crayola would suffice. After a many, many abortive attempts in which I came out looking like most of the (non-human) cast of Planet of the Apes and - on one horrible occasion - Elton John, I finally came up with an artwork in which I somewhat resemble a defeated bulldog. It perfectly captures one of my main characteristics: an inability to draw well.