Fitness, health and phones in the modern world
I suspect this – my latest report from the front-line of sexagenarian super-fitness campaigns – will merely go to underscore the truism that ‘oldies’ have it tougher than any other generation.
Okay, we baby boomers started it all – with the Yippies’ rallying call of “Never trust anyone over the age of thirty!”, the cult of living in the moment and the wonderful explosion of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll in the Sixties (which, as usual with my luck, some of us missed out on our share of because we were too young and/or incarcerated in the countryside in single-sex boarding schools), but these days ‘fifty is the new thirty’ and every movie star of my age either looks impossibly youthful and/or, alternatively, a complete horrendous mess with their dials ravaged not so much by Time but by the effects of tens of botched face-lifts and/or Botox treatments.
These days, with my ageing mental powers rendering my short-term memory limited, regular Rust readers may be more familiar than I am with my 2016 hip replacement and the 2019 burning to the ground of my health club just hours after I did my last session there on the eve of it re-opening after an eight-month refurbishment.
At the beginning of September last I “yanked” my Achilles tendon attempting a short, tentative, jog. I am still suffering from the resulting chronic inflammation which has left me doing a fair impression of one of the dancer zombies hobbling around in the background of the video to Michael Jackson’s mega-hit ditty Thriller whenever I go out and about in the locality of where I live.
Three visits to my GP and regular physio exercises, a dozen laser and/or ultrasound treatments and my efforts to ‘walk it off’ have proved fruitless and about three weeks ago I returned to my local GP surgery to plead for action in the cause of getting my movement back – if not to how it was when I was 28 – at least to how I was on my 68th birthday.
A visit to my local NHS specialist physio unit was recommended.
All I had to do was wait for them to contact me with the earliest proposed appointment they could award me.
This came in the post ten days ago and it turn out that this is in the middle of May.
I suppose one can be thankful for small mercies – at least it is in May 2020, not 2021.
One recent minor ‘advance’ is the excitement generated by being contacted and invited to take part in the latest round of the nation’s ongoing campaign to check for bowel cancer – something that we oldies get prompted about every two or three years, I forget which.
As a break from the numbing nothingness of everyday life, this opportunity is like coming across an oasis after crawling about 160 miles on your hands and knees through a Sahara-sized wasteland.
The last time I took part the tool-kit I was sent was large and complicated and involved collecting three successive days’ worth of stool samples with a small spatula, pasting them onto a series of cardboard units supplied for the purpose, then packing up the whole, sealing it in a strong envelope and posting it off to wherever it went for laboratory testing.
Eight years ago it so occurred that my father and I both received our kits at the same time and – as chaps do, but interestingly it seems generally not the female of the species – we delighted in comparing notes as to how we were getting on with the programme.
As the Saturday morning of a late August Bank Holiday dawned – this in the middle of a serious heat wave – I rang my parent and asked if he’d yet sent off his package. When the answer came back in the negative, I asked why not.
“Well, with this bloody weather on, I didn’t much fancy the idea of my shit fouling the atmosphere at the Mount Pleasant sorting centre for the whole of a four-day weekend …”
Rusters might like to know that as time passes and new technologies become available even medical techniques and practices evolve.
This time my kit consisted of a much-smaller and more efficient package involving an easy-to-use tube and (importantly) the need for only one sample – rather than three – to be collected and posted off to its destination.
Mine duly went off yesterday in the morning collection from the post box or the corner beside the general store from which I purchase my newspapers.
Lastly, as yet another example of an oldie’s confrontation with the modern world, for want of anything better to do, yesterday I walked – or peg-legged – my way to my local phone shop in order to be given a demonstration of the new phones to which I was now entitled (if I wished) to upgrade to under my current smartphone contract.
The youthful assistant I engaged for this tutorial was efficiency and helpfulness personified.
We worked our way around the tables in the shop on which the latest in smartphone technology was exhibited in all its glory.
I kid you not, apparently the very latest iPhone (please don’t ask me its title or designation) costs well north of £1,000!
This – and its various Android-powered opposition competitors – now offer up to three cameras and not only umpteen times greater power and memory storage, but also numbers of dazzling capabilities and gizmo applications than their predecessor models – and, what’s more, certainly far more than I could take in the names of, still less understand anything of what they did.
As I mentioned, my companion was very knowledgeable and good at his sales job, but eventually retired hurt when – after about 20 minutes – I thanked him and announced that I was now going home now to think about my decision.
And then added that – instead of upgrading to one of these monsters that could not only do stuff I had no idea was possible, but also probably complete my annual income tax form for me, cook a meal and even probably attend meetings as a hologram on my behalf on occasions when I couldn’t be bothered to attend myself – since I only ever used my current smartphone to make telephone calls, send texts or WhatApp messages, and (very rarely) consult the BBC weather App, I was actually thinking of “trading down” to a bog-standard phone paid for via “pay as you go” topping up the credit when necessary.
