Pride and Fall

Stuff happens in life and sometimes it surprises you.

I occasionally post a blog to this organ on the ongoing subject of my attempt to hold back the years by conducting a fitness campaign in my senior years. It’s no secret that I’ve have been doing it for a while now, as a result of which my current perspective has become that of someone in his eighth decade on this planet.

Yesterday my daughter Grace, hubby Terry and 22 month old grandson Hughie pitched up chez moi in order to stay for a couple of days.

Because of the Covid pandemic, my “speeding points” driving disqualification and my general lack of funds to be able to pay for the punitive level of cost that various car insurers I have approached would require me to shell out in order to obtain insurance cover to drive on the roads of Britain, since his birth I have seen far less of Hughie – whose family live in the Midlands – than I would have liked.

Which is why we had a great pile of “catching up” to do. You can see all the photos and video clips of a young child that you would ever want or need to see, and that’s one thing. However, quite another is seeing said sprog in the flesh after a gap of what must be four months.

This is probably a slight exaggeration, but (to my mind) back then Hughie seemed to be slightly behind his contemporaries in his development. Whereas the other babies he was playing with were already taking tentative steps and seemingly able to utter sounds that were beginning to sound like proper words, he was still getting about by crawling and reacting to the world around him primarily with grunts and/or screams of frustration.

Fast-forward to yesterday afternoon and – no sooner than the rear door of the car had been opened and he was freed from his car seat harness – a supercharged force of nature was released. He came out of the traps like a dingbat, almost jogging around the garden, keenly examining everything he came across (even gates and pieces of garden equipment), trying to “make them work” and chatting away with great animation in simple, few word sentences.

Quite a revelation, I can tell you. Furthermore – for Grace and her better half, as happens with all parents – the need for vigilance never ceases, it just changes to one type of issue to another.

About sixty years ago there was once a famous Beyond The Fringe sketch performed by Peter Cook – playing the part of an elderly patriarchal British Prime Minister (an uncanny impersonation of the then Premier Harold Macmillan) – spoke to the nation on radio about, inter alia, the then national economic crisis and the potential threat of nuclear war.

On the latter subject, he announced that – were the threat of an impending nuclear attack to become known – the Government would immediately broadcast a four-minute warning.

He then went on to comment that some listeners might be wondering what they could they possibly do to make themselves safe within such a small period of time: “I would like to remind you that some people in this great nation of ours can run a mile in four minutes …”

Based upon yesterday’s performance something not dissimilar can also apply to a toddler who has recently acquired the ability to walk at speed and is left alone for thirty seconds!

Not long after Grace and family had arrived we were having a coffee and a general chat when I received a significant blow to my pride.

Asked how my latest fitness campaign was going, I mentioned that I had now amassed no fewer than 40 consecutive days in which I had achieved my daily target of 10,000 steps … (an achievement that I had been secretly hoping might qualify me for a mention in the next Guinness Book of Records).

Grace then dashed my glowing sense of pride by announcing that she was currently on a similar 55-day streak!