And so it comes to this
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I wake up in the night and go on the newspaper websites to catch up with what’s happening and wish I hadn’t bothered.
A lady could get depressed reading the doom-mongering stuff being put about in the media. Never mind Brexit, Donald Trump, Syria, Somalia, the Article 50 debate and the prospect of this weekend’s X Factor final, what’s really important is whether Prince Harry’s latest squeeze is going to me marching him up the aisle in 2017 and will my hair roots need touching up before the 16th of January when I’m due to be taken to see a performance by the Royal Ballet.
My texts today come from the website of The Independent, which is traditionally the first I visit each day on my trawl of the newspaper websites because it is relatively insubstantial and therefore swiftest to complete in my quest to catch up with what’s happening.
At the moment it seems that the headline development is that the end of the world is nigh. See here for pieces on the imminent threat to the survival of some much loved animal species:
No less worrying, it seems to me, is the news that those of us over fifty years of age are now rapidly becoming prey to an epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases:
THE PERILS OF OLD-AGE SEXUAL ACTIVITY
A decade or so ago, as I hurtled towards senility and decrepitude, one of the reassuring aspects was the thought that not far off was the day when one could at last escape the tyranny of raging hormones, second or third time around vaguely-seedy and somewhat desperate ageing males – full to the eyeballs with Viagra – prowling the lists of endless cocktail and dinner parties in pursuit of one last shot at lasting happiness.
Fat chance! The ever-present social pressures of not wishing to appear ‘past it’, but rather still raging against the dying of the light along with anyone else, now raises the very real prospect that on any given day we shall pop along to our local STI clinic only to find oneself sitting alongside our children, and possibly even grandchildren, flicking through two-year-old editions of Country Life in the waiting room together.
I cannot but help myself thinking that Life was somehow much easier and simpler thirty years ago.
