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I can't believe that I am 58 next year.
It seems like only yesterday that I was worrying that if my career didn't pick up I might not get back on TV until I was in my 40s. And in my early 40s I made a resolution to walk everywhere and get fit so that when I was in my 50s I could be one of those wiry, slim, men who looks grizzled but tough.
Now suddenly my 50s are basically done and I have achieved neither of those aims.
It's true that I have done other stuff instead so I am not too fussed about my failure. What I am fussed about is that fact that I had those thoughts, blinked and found myself basically well past the sell-by date of both of them.
For some of my 50s I have been quite fit -aside from the cancer and high blood pressure- but never in danger of being wiry or impressive for my age. I guess I also hoped that in this decade I would somehow buck the trend of a lifetime and become organised and sartorially dapper. The TV Producer Paul Jackson who worked on The Young Ones and then also turned out to be a champion of Lee and Herring (and was also responsible for commissioning my last major TV break "You Can Choose Your Friends") always looked so smart and sophisticated and I thought that maybe when I grew up I would be like him.
It has not turned out that way. I have a couple of posh suits, but I always look like a nine-year old who's been squeezed into them by his parents and looks uncomfortable and wrong. I just chuck on anything that's lying around most of the time and today I found myself wearing saggy jogging bottoms, trainers with no socks, a baggy RHLSTP T-shirt and my very scruffy dog walking /stone-clearing North Face coat. What would anyone think if they recognised me? Firstly they would probably think it was tragic that I was out wearing my own merch and secondly they'd assume that that bloke from the 1990s must have had a rough few years as he's now homeless and just has his dog for company.
I am lucky in many ways that I have managed to dodge fame. I often think of David Mitchell and Victoria Coren being papped a few weeks after the birth of their first child, out walking her in a pram and being criticised by the tabloids for daring to step out of the house and not looking like they were on the red carpet. I have tried to get beyond envying anyone else's career, but David Mitchell's professional life is probably the closest to how I would have liked my own to have gone (again if you were asking me back in my thirties) - a successful sketch show, a lovely job on the best panel show on TV, parts in sitcoms and some nice acting jobs that don't stretch you too far but which you get to shine in anyway (Ludwig is a lot of fun and like a classy Death in Paradise crossed with Jonathan Creek and you can't get much better than that - if you are me).
However, I would not have liked the bit where paps were jumping out of the bushes in Hitchin, taking photos of me in mismatched clothes which made me look like a weird laundry basket and tabloids questioning whether everything is all right at home as it seemed apparent to anyone that I had lost my mind and was surely living alone.
I am sure I wouldn't have coped well with real fame at all (though I'd still be prepared to give it a go, casting directors) and being a comedy fan who has won a competition or gets to meet his heroes for an hour because he's had cancer suits me best.
I'd still love to be slim and wear a nice suit every day, even if I would be smeared in Marmite within the first 30 seconds (and not by the kids and not because I'd been eating Marmite either - it would just happen by magic). I would, I also have to remember, like to not die until my age starts with a 7 (so I can get two more decade round up stand up shows in and perhaps more importantly live to see my kids become adults). So whilst I might never be suave, I can at least still hope against hope and experience, to be a bit slimmer and more limber. As regular readers will know my weight basically goes down one year and then up the next (though impressively the highs are lower than they used to be, but the lows are also higher than they used to be), so I ended 2023 in serious danger of looking fit (in both senses) and will end 2024 back to where I was at the end of 2022.
Yesterday's pizza convinced me it was time to get the 2025 weight loss programme underway and so maybe I can now have the dream of being one of those men in their sixties who you still see running the streets or cycling around dressed in lycra and looking smart and silver-foxy in restaurants and you'd think about trying to fuck if only their penises still worked (but you could at least bum them if they're up for it). So that's the plan... what I'm 75 now? And still a fat slob/now dead. How did that happen so quick.
There's a chance I might make some permanent changes.
I made these weird almond flour biscuits today which incredibly score about 86/100 for me on the Zoe app (which is extremely good - I used 90% dark chocolate which makes them even healthier) and they tasted incredible (if they were a bit crumbly). I will never stop eating a Solero a day. You'll have to pry my last Solero from my cold dead hands (which will be hard given their frozen nature), but if there are snacks like these biscuits out there then there is hope for me to lose weight in spite of my sweet tooth and chocolate addiction.
