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Tuesday, May 09, 2006

The shock of the old

There are some days when even one of the, supposedly, best preserved 45.88 year olds looks in the mirror and sees only the ravages of time. Today was such a day. The crows feet, previously almost imperceptible seemed as crevices and the admittedly large crown at the back of my head appeared to have quadrupled in size since last time I had washed my hair. Wearing my contact lenses for the first time in a week or so it was nigh on impossible to see what was going on back there even doing the hairdresser's trick of holding a smaller mirror to reflect into a bigger one. Methinks that varifocals cannot be far off.

Often the reality of it is that nothing has changed except your mood, the way you feel at that moment, the level of your confidence, how healthy your self-esteem is. Clearly today most of those were not in high positive figures.

I had the wizard idea of taking a picture of the back of my head with our digital camera and after many attempts, all of which were roughly the same shot ie the wrong one, though I could have sworn I had changed the angle, I managed to get one which framed the area in question adequately. Thankfully the damage is nowhere near as bad as I had at first thought.

It was quite unnerving though. Nearer 50 than 40, eons away from 30 and 20 something now a distant memory, all that is corporeal must inevitably deteriorate. Get over it!

Everything cuts back to reality of course and real life presents its real problems to give you something less vain to think about. One of the dogs has decided to make a visit next door and has found a length of fence which is loose to scrabble under.

She only wanted to have a look at what was going on chez the neighbours whose children are rather nice to her. She doesn't worry about what she looks like in the mirror. I doubt if she would know her own reflection.

Now there's a lesson...

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