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Only 2500 days until my 20,000th day on the planet. Can’t wait. It’s less than 7 years away. Come on time, fly onwards so we can celebrate that. OK that’s quite a long way away. But only 159 days to my 5000th consecutive blog. I think I might actually make that.
As I took my daughter to the nursery this afternoon I passed an old man on the other side of the road, walking incredibly slowly with the help of two walking sticks. He looked up at me with large, hollow eyes, holding my gaze and seemed to be saying, "You fool, don't you realise you will be like this one day?” But I didn’t realise it. In fact I was confident that I will never become old. Not because I think I will die. Just because I can’t envisage it. And neither could that old man when he was my age. He saw old people and assumed they were some other species, like a caterpillar might look at a butterfly and feel no connection. And even though his eyes implored me to appreciate my working legs and my relative youth, I ignored him, because he was clearly an idiot. As if that could happen to me.
I wondered if he might be me for the future, come back to make me appreciate what I have ,but if so, I don't know why he wasted his time, because he must know I won't realise that until it happens.
Just like he/I didn’t.
I have too much going on to contemplate my rapidly approaching decrepitude, so it’s a pity that I wasted my one afternoon where the baby is cared for by other people sitting in cafes and tweeting rubbish. But sometimes we need days like that and I suppose not being in charge of a baby made it possible. So that wasn’t a waste of money at all.
I had fully intended to go swimming and wore my trunks under my clothes all afternoon, but decided my time would be better spent tweeting a joke about why the word palindrome is not a palindrome, that didn’t even work and then wondering why the word anagram was not an anagram and suggesting it should be anagramised every time it was used, thus never be able to appear in a dictionary. It was rubbish. I should stick to telling people when International Men’s Day is and retweeting Lord Sugar.
I quite enjoyed doing anagrams of celebrities names that looked like they might be real but weren’t, like Richard Stilgoe is an anagram of "Hostile itch ghost” and Giles Brandreth is an anagram of "Randy Breath Gimp”. I also enjoyed saying that Virginia Bottomley was an anagram of "Virgin Bottom ialey” and then when people told me that it was also “I am an evil Tory bigot” telling them that “virgin bottom ialey” was a better anagram. I was right too.
As the world slides into inevitable nuclear holocaust and the inadequacies of democracy are being aptly demonstrated (in case the rise of Hitler didn’t tip you off), it’s good that I am concentrating on the important stuff.
A new London date has been added to the Happy Now? tour for those of you who missed it or who had hoped to come to the Bloomsbury. It’s at the Leicester Square Theatre on June 12th. Book here.
This week I am at Warwick Arts Centre on Thursday, Oxford Glee on Friday (sold out) and Northampton on Saturday. Come along or spread the word.
Winner of the monthly subscriber's monthly draw this month was Huw O`Sullivan. Pay a pound or more a month here to be in with a chance of winning some priceless Richard Herring goodies each month..