Process of ageing

It's my birthday!

No longer, admittedly, the occasion for celebration and excitement that it once was.  In fact I can only once remember when I was at Junior school my mother offering to do me a birthday party, when she gave me the chance of having a party or an extra-special (i.e. expensive) present, and I somewhat anti-socially chose the present!  Needless to say I've long since forgotten what it was.

One thing I do remember, doing a bit of reminiscing, is how apprehensive we all all were back in the year 2000 being at the mercy of the so-called 'millennium bug'.  Would it mark the end of life as we knew it?  It didn't: life carried on just the same despite all the prophets of doom.

I don't know about anyone else, but the last seventeen years haven't been particularly eventful ones for me, not compared, say, to the first seventeen years of my life.  I survived my childhood, and free of the pervasive creeping influence of the nanny-state, those years were by and large happy, carefree ones - although I'm pretty sure I didn't think so at the time.  On the other hand despite the intrinsic curiosity value I certainly wouldn't want to back and relive them, or at least certainly not in a modern setting.  There's a well-known natural tendency to remember things from long ago as being better than they actually were, of course.

And what of the last seventeen?  They've been marked by the major event of leaving work and while I'm tempted to say that my retirement hasn't been anything like I thought it was going to be, I don't honestly think I'd given that much thought to what it was going to be like.  I've always tended to go for the make-it-up-as-you-go-along  approach.

One thing which has marked the last 17 years was my decision in the year 2000 to start an online diary, of which this this blog is the latest incarnation.  I've only very occasionally trawled back to see what I was thinking about and writing about - and most of it I suspect was fairly trivial.  But it is/was an insight into how I was feeling at the time, and I've never deleted or altered anything.  And while I don't blog as frequently or consistently as I did when I first started, I keep it going because I want to.  It's just for me, and not, God forbid, for future generations of schoolboys à la Pepys!