Warming Up

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Wednesday 2nd May 2007

I am coming to understand the phrase "over the hill" which I used in yesterday's entry a lot better. I think 40 is probably the top of the hill and once you are passed that milestone you are on your way down the other side.
You spend the first four decades of your life, struggling gamely up this hill, hurrying as fast as you can to get to the top, not even really stopping to look at all the beauty and opportunities around you. Just getting to the summit is all that counts. But once you're at the peak you get a chance to look back and what you left behind and forward to what's coming and you realise you've made a terrible mistake.
Behind you is a lush green valley, full of happy cavorting young people who want to be your friend and bountious feasts of the finest food and wonderful sights of nature at its most fecund, but ahead of you is a dark, stoney, icy valley, littered with the bodies of the dead and dying. You want to turn round and go back down the way you came and maybe come back up a bit more slowly, but your way is blocked. You'r allowed to look at it and suddenly with the future mapped out in front of you you truly get a perspective of what you've left behind. But you can't go back. You're being man-handled into a toboggan that is going to send you whizzing through the remaining forty years of your life at great speed, and might well just throw you off before you get to the bottom so you die in pain and agony along with all the other idiots who rushed to get over the hill, only to find that the hill was what it was all about.
Doubtless this image will form the basis of my new Edinburgh show.
Only funny.
You know. I will have to make it funny.