58 today

I awoke this morning with the feeling of something different. Then I remembered, with a start, like a load of coals falling down a chute, today is my 58th birthday. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world on 5 August 1950, when steam still ruled the universe and the USA beat England in a world cup football match. Nothing much changed there, then, apart from the bit about the steam. Here we are, all that time on, less at peace with ourselves than we have ever been, more materialistic than we have ever needed to be, but still here, and, me, like a wild elder growing in a soot-black garden in Featherstone, sort of hanging on. I look at my physical condition - it's not bad. Heart and lungs alright, although my left knee and hip are starting to give me gyp, a legacy of years and years of playing sport. Apart from a tendency to leave my wallet in strange places, my mental state seems robust enough. Philosophically, life is starting to make a little bit of sense and, lo and behold, after years of distraction and subversion, does contentment at last lie ahead? My creativity is dulled by an increasing lack of imagination- that's an oxymoron - how can one have an 'increasing lack' of anything? That itself shows a lack of imagination. I reflect on the past - all those people I have met - all that comic potential. Is there a comic novel in me somewhere? From Jim Riddles, who thought he was Oscar Wilde and walked into the local supermarket saying 'We love you all, Bristol," to Eddie Whyne and his red book of shortages. "What are you going to do about these?" he would yell, waving the aforementioned tome in my face. "What do you want me to do - go and make the stuff myself?", I was wont to reply in my more confrontational days. The strange Peter Broadfoot, who had a face like a squashed avocado and who once offered to fight me over whose responsibility it was to collect the coffee money. I declined, because he already looked as if he'd gone 14 rounds with ''Enery's 'Ammer' and there was no guarantee I would have won. Finally, there was the odious Henry Grice, colleague on the sales side, with whom I had an altercation which ended in me pinning him to the wall of the reception by his lapels. Happy days.