Tag Archives: old age

Back (Pain) to the Future

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Being a tall man certainly has its advantages: you can see over high fences; you can reach things in shops that would be out-of-reach to most mortals of average height (like jars of olives and dirty magazines); and you’ve got a ready-made moral right to claim aisle-seats in planes and cinemas.

But there’s a flip-side:

1) short people will ask you what the weather’s like up there almost every single day, and expect a big laugh each and every time (what they won’t expect is for you to smash them into the ground like tiny tent pegs, so do that);

2) in shops you’ll become a slave to little old ladies who can’t even reach the Bisto shelf unaided, much less the porn and olives;

3) thanks to your height people will automatically assume you’re a gifted basketball player, and then laugh when you leap in the direction of the hoop like a highly-effeminate trampolining Nazi;

4) and, finally, and perhaps most crucially, you’ll suffer such exquisite back-pain that even glamour models with big cannon-ball boobs that have been cosmetically-enhanced into the high alphabet will express deep and earnest sympathy for your plight.

What I think I look like with a sore back.

I’m a tall man who sits behind a desk for a living and gets little opportunity for exercise. I’m also the son of a tall man who spent most of his adult life cursed with a bad back; plus I’m getting older, weaker, and generally creakier. I’m a chiropractor’s wet dream.

That being said, I’ve been pretty lucky only to have experienced intermittent pain and discomfort. Genetics and heredity being what they are, I could well have spent most of my life hunched over like a bell-ringer with a chronic self-abuse problem.

I may not experience back pain often, but when it comes – much like the bell-ringer – it comes hard. A few weeks ago I was showering before work when I felt a sharp, sudden, jolting pain in my back, like someone had thrown a harpoon down my spine. The pain moved up and down, and kept returning, so there were hints of boomerang in there, too. Let’s just split the difference and call it a ‘harpoonerang of agony’.

What I actually look like.

Because there’s no such thing as a moment to yourself in a house shared with children, my eldest son, Jack,happened to be on the pan poo-poo-ing at the same time as I was showering. This gave him literally the best seat in the house from which to view my torment. When I cried out in pain, he expressed sympathy in the only way he knows how: by laughing hysterically and cruelly mimicking my oyahs and back spasms. I usually play the clown at home, so in one respect I was being hoisted by my own petard (Tommy Cooper must have felt similarly miffed as he keeled over dead to a chorus of hoots and cheers), but, in another respect, my son’s clearly an irredeemable savage, and I’ll make sure he pays for this day’s sacrilege for the rest of his miserable fucking life.

As the pain intensified, my youngest son, Christopher – doubtless attracted by the siren call of his big brother’s cackles – waddled into the bathroom. He stood at the side of the bath with a big grin on his face and also began impersonating me, making ‘ooooo’ sounds in the manner of a mildly-amused monkey. I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, which sent a few more pellets of pain ricocheting up my spine.

And this, too.

I made it to the bedroom, walking like a lock-legged zombie, each pull of the towel across my wet skin more like a knifing than a drying. The pain became too much, and I lowered myself onto the bed, where I lay flop-backed like a capsized tortoise. Jack decided that the best way to alleviate my suffering would be to bounce up and down on the bed beside me and then jump down onto my stomach. All that was missing was a referee slapping the bed for the three-count. Christopher decided to sink his teeth into my nipple and clamp on with all his dental might, like an angry parrot. At least their mum didn’t make it the hat-trick by taking a 2X4 to my bollocks.

“What about your work?” my partner, Chelsea, asked, as I lay prone.

“Work? WORK? What about my ‘walk’? I can’t even stand, for Christ’s sake.”

She tried everything to get me back on my feet: berating me, telling me how pathetic I looked, making repeated references to how old I was. Nothing worked! Actually, flippancy aside, I know for a fact she used every tool at her disposal to help me up: I know because she put my socks on my feet.

Now, she hates feet in general, but she hates my feet more than a whole wheelbarrowful of disembodied leper feet. My feet repulse her. Even if they’re clean. Even if they’re freshly showered. Even if they’ve just been decontaminated with super-strong chemicals in a government laboratory, and then scrubbed and filed down to the bone, and then doused in turps and rubbing alcohol. Even then she’d rather die than massage them. She doesn’t even like looking at them.

What she did was love. Or pity. It’s one of them, certainly, and who cares which? It’s a win for me, and that’s the important thing. It gets better, though. Not only did she put my socks on my feet, but she gave me a back massage, too. The only thing missing was the offer of a bowl of hot Bisto, a tub of olives and half hour alone with my laptop, and it would’ve been my perfect day.

After close to forty minutes spent writhing on the bed, I managed to wriggle and struggle and roll and heave myself to my feet. I had to push my neck up and out, like a giraffe spoiling for a fight. I started to move in slow-motion, desperately avoiding any stretches or twinges that would send me back to the surface of the bed a half-crippled beetle of a man. I was feeling a little self-conscious, wondering if I looked a little bit silly, a fear quickly confirmed when Chelsea burst out laughing.

“I’m glad my incapacity amuses you so much,” I huffed.

“I’m sorry, it’s just… you look like you’re doing a moon-walk.”

She then imitated me, which made Jack laugh again, which made me laugh, and which, predictably, sent me back to the surface of the bed a half-crippled beetle of a man. Getting up the second time was easier, but no less painful. “I’m really not sure I should be going to work,” I said. “Look how long it’s taken me to stand up and put socks on. And I never even put the socks on myself.”

I peered down at my son, Jack, who was no longer mocking or laughing, but looking up at me with a heavy, mournful face, his eyes wet with the first faint shimmer of tears. That beautiful little soul. I’d thought him callous and unkind, a psychopath in training. And yet there he was, moved to tears by my predicament. My blessed boy. My little miracle. Suddenly, none of the pain mattered. My boy was unspeakably kind and compassionate, and if the agony of my mattress-based crucifixion had been necessary to coax that out of him, then so be it. It was a price worth paying.

Except that’s not why he was on the brink of tears.

He thought that if I stayed off work with my half-crippled back then he wouldn’t be able to go to the zoo with his grandpa.

I smiled and laughed, and then thought to myself…

‘I hope he inherits my big, long back…’

Remember the Spectrum, Grandpa?

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I wrote something about growing old earlier this week, which this piece complements. It’s an oldie, if you’ll excuse the very shite and very unintended pun. As I was scouring through files on my laptop I came across this little age-related-rant that I whipped up seven years ago, inspired by Terry Christian… – Jamie

Good for you, being all hip and that, grandma. Unfortunately, your old fucking fingers are now stuck like that.

I heard an advert on the radio the other night. Naturally, because I’m so old, I had to turn up the volume to hear it. That was only after a little clenching and unclenching of my arthritic fingers, just to warm them up. It’s impossible to twiddle the controls these days with the springy, cavalier ease which I recall I exhibited in my youth. Well, I can just about recall it; senile dementia is no laughing matter, you know. 

I’m 25, by the way. Sure, I’m nearer thirty than twenty, and most of my friends are prepared or preparing to enter the 2.4 children phase of their lives; but am I past it? I’m still just a kid.

Not according to Terry Christian; nor to the cosmetics giant that employs him to advertise their products. The product being hocked was some sort of anti-aging face-cream for guys, and the company was Oil of Ulay, or Nivea, or something. Never matter. It was their pitch – not their product – that irked me.

Here’s the gist of it.

Probably best not to take lifestyle advice from this prick.

Terry asked whether or not I remembered the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I do. I had one. When I was five. And I loved it. Apparently, so Terry claims, fond memories of and familiarity with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum places me in the category of men who should really start to worry about the effects of ageing on their peeling, wrinkled old faces. I repeat, for the record: I am 25. 25 years old.

Don’t the executives at whatever company this is have enough of a customer-base in people who are, oh, let’s say, significantly older than me? Not to be ageist, of course; but I know a lot of people who are the same age as me and never have I regarded them as old sows and warlocks a mere fifteen minutes from the morgue.

This tactic, which seems to me like a profit-boosting pre-emptive strike, makes me fear for the future. I can just hear the greedy little buffoons in the boardroom now: ‘Let’s generate a mass hysteria about ageing and convince perfectly young, smooth-skinned people that the modern world has destroyed, or will destroy imminently, their youthful looks, and so their only hope of facial salvation lies in our safe, money-grabbing hands.’ Maybe these people – these ingenious arseholes – believe, or hope, that the wrinkled masses will begin using their product through their late teens into their dotage, and finally become so terrified to stop using it – lest they age forty years overnight and then die – that perhaps even the mortician will be persuaded to trowel some on to them as they lie rigid in their coffins.

“SO YOU’RE DEAD? IT DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN’T STILL TURN HEADS.”

Just how far down the age spectrum are these bastards willing to boldly go? I’m willing to bet a split infinitive that their pound-lust knows no limits.

‘So, how old are you?’

‘I’m six.’

‘Huh… but you look ten.’

Batty – definitely worth a hot splodge over your new 50inch HD. Look at the way the old whore handles that broom. She’s asking for it.

Can it be that the same society telling us that young people effectively run the world is also telling us that the price we pay for ruling the world is to look fifty when we’re thirty? Media and marketing cunts have spent many years convincing us on television, satellite and radio that the days of the wise old elder are over; that the old are decrepit fools who can’t keep up with the pace of channel-changing, green-hair-dyeing, sex-in-the-city-watching, metro-sexual modern life. Long live the adolescent seems to be the credo. Are we to infer that the stress of sustaining this reversal of status is burning us out?

We’re all having our mid-life crises in our twenties; we’re all on Prozac; checking in to Betty Ford clinics; going to stress counsellors; buying anti-ageing products by the bucket-load.

Has our Picture of Dorian Gray syndrome caught up with us so early?

Anyway, that’s a snack for thought. I’m off to sort out my funeral plan and jet up to the bathroom in my Stenna Stairlift. Is Last of the Summer Wine on tonight? Maybe I’ll be able to sustain my ancient erection just long enough to crack one off over Nora Batty.

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In case you missed it, here’s the piece I wrote last week about turning 32: http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/13/happy-birthday/

 

Happy Birthday?

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Me, and how I stay youthful.

I just turned 32.

This is a strange age. It’s the age where people start dying; or at least the age where it starts to become less of a surprise when your friends and acquaintances keel over like pit canaries.

‘They were so… young,’ we say, not quite believing the words as they stagger uncertainly from our lips. It’s almost framed as a question. ‘They were so… young?’

I’ve always been certain that a heart attack will serve as the final sentence in the book of my life. I’m not psychic: just Scottish. At death, most pasty-skinned Celts will find the Grim Reaper holding their engorged heart in his bony hand, bouncing it like a blood-filled happy-sack as he points to the fat-smeared hole in their chest and says: ‘Looking for this, you fat bastard?’ Yes, there’s no doubt in my mind. Jamie Andrew’s heart is destined to burst like a rotten peach under the treads of a tank.

Fuck you, Murphy. You're shite at living.

I become filled with anxiety when I hear of a celebrity dying in their early 30s. As if their premature death somehow makes my own more likely. Brittany Murphy, Heath Ledger: they both gave me palpitations. When a celebrity dies young I always chant inside my head ‘Please be drugs, please be drugs, please be drugs, please be drugs,’ and when it’s drugs I fist the air and shout ‘YES!!’ Which is pretty horrible of me, but then I never claimed to be anything other than a deeply, deeply horrible human being. They die of drugs, I don’t die of a heart attack. Yet. That’s the deal.

I guess I am still young, though. I look young, so I’m told, despite the rainforests of hair that seem to sprout from every available orifice. What’s with that? So much hair grows from my ears that I could pleat it and join Aswad. No joke. Bed bugs could abseil from my ear lobe down to my shoulder. This shouldn’t happen until I’m in my sixties or something, right? I don’t want to look like my grandfather just yet. Well, he’s dead, so of course I don’t want to look like him. I meant I don’t want to look like he did during his twilight years. Not at 32, anyway. His ears looked like they had boom mikes coming out of them. And the ears themselves were all waxy and gnarly, making him look like the head Ferengi from Star Trek.

My nose is no different, over-abundance-of-hair-wise. I always notice the hairs in the mirror when I’m driving, and then spend about five minutes yanking what look like wires from my nostrils. So if you’re on the roads in Falkirk, look out for a big tall guy clawing at his face and screaming in horror at his reflection: that’ll be me. So much hair dangles from my nose that it looks like a tarantula is trying to escape from my face. Honestly, it’s like steel wool. I could headbutt a pot and scour it at the same time.

It's the Argos Nose Hair remover I've got, if you're interested.

Which is why my mother gave me an electric nose-and-ear-hair remover for my birthday. No shit. She did. And do you know what the worst thing is? I was grateful. It’s something I need. At 32? Next year it’ll be a Noel Edmonds’ sweater and a brochure for a SAGA holiday. And bring on the socks and pants. I love getting socks and pants now. I wish I’d been more grateful to my grandparents when I was younger, and hadn’t just sneered when I ripped open the wrapping paper to find yet another 5-pack of Asda’s-own boxer shorts. I didn’t realise what a valuable commodity they were back then. Thank you, grandma and grandpa (X2). I sometimes think they were trying to tell me, in some hush-hush yet none-too-subtle grandparent code, that growing old is pants. I think they were on to something.

Anyway, here’s to the next 32. Well… maybe.