Turning back time (not)

I didn’t watch yesterday England’s 2-0 World Cup qualifier win over Lithuania yesterday because I was on my way to the gym and wasn’t that interested. Call me old-fashioned in this era when FIFA want 128 or something nations to play in the World Cup Finals but, for me, in prospect any England game against Lithuania sounds like a friendly and a nailed-on bore-fest in the making.

The big news, however – and it’s something that every man jack of us over the age of thirty should be celebrating – is that Sunderland talisman striker Jermain Defoe opened the scoring in the twentieth minute at the geriatric age of 34, four years after he last bent the net for his country.

The media has been hyping the feat partly because Defoe is a bit of a general folk hero for his ‘adoption’ of terminally ill cancer sufferer four-year old Bradley Lowery as a mascot and partly because it warms the cockles of all oldies (and there’s a lot more of us these days, in fact what looks like an ever-growing number as we hurtle into the future, a fact that any commercially-sensitive media vehicle seeking a following cannot ignore) that someone of Defoe’s vintage can actually still get picked to play for his country, let alone score for it. Good old Jermain! He’s showing these kids that there’s life in the old dog yet! There, but for the grace of God … etc.

Of course, since it always likes to strike down the tallest poppies, the media is simultaneously revelling in the opportunity to write off the career of ‘too many miles on the clock’, slow, fat and thick Shrek-lookalike former Manchester United and England icon 31 year-old Wayne Rooney. He’s been past it for years and the only question now is whether he’s going to go out to pasture via a cut price deal back to Everton and/or get one last Pololski-style ‘soft’ England appearance at Wembley as a celebratory send-off farewell to international football.

Meanwhile – as a balding, white-haired mid-sixties retiree who has spent my years from 40 to 65 trying [as the American much-surgically altered singing siren Cher so aptly put it in 1989] to ‘turn back time’ – I spend a lot of my time burdened by a sense of puzzlement.

Not because I’m necessarily suffering from early-onset dementia (though it has been said), but because I’ve been wrestling with the middle-aged-and-beyond’s constant dilemma of whether to exercise like a dervish, and attempt the Daily Telegraph crossword every morning after brekker – this in a desperate effort to ‘hold back the years’ and improve my chances of having an active and useful quality of life in old age – or to ‘relax, let go of all life’s worries, just accept that my time has gone, all the better to enjoy the grey cardigans, carpet slippers, gardening chores and hearing-aid assisted broadcasting offerings of the BBC Home Service and television channels’ stage of human existence.

It so happens, for reasons which need not detain us here, that I spent much of last Friday morning engaged upon a not-insignificant task – i.e. doing someone the favour of supervising the transfer of four and a half thousand paperback books (contained in some 350 boxes of 13 each) from one storage unit in south London to another about three miles away.

As Friday dawn broke the Ingolby sap was rising. Not personally being a man noted for his technical or practical prowess, before the ‘off’ I literally had no idea how this labour of Hercules was going to be accomplished – if at all – and indeed just how long it was going to take. The latter was of some interest to me because the ‘two men with a van’ that I had hired to help me carry out the task were being paid a not insubstantial sum by the hour.

In the event things unfolded as well or even better than I had dared hope. Four of us in all had been called to arms and the ‘men with the van’ were completely unknown to me, save by local recommendation. Yet within minutes of being introduced to each other we had devised a system of sorts for taking the books off the pallets that they had been stored upon, chucking them into the back of the van and sorting them into a block so that they both fitted in and would not move about in transit.

At the ‘receiving end’ we then took them off the van and along a passage to their new home (stacked against a wall) by deploying ourselves in a human chain that involved passing all 350 boxes of books from one of us to another. I’m proud to say that, although it was hard manual work that I feared might take an age to complete, our combination of team camaraderie and preparedness to graft meant that we accomplished the entire operation in three hours when I had anticipated it might end up taking five or six.

This was a considerable relief and a source of some private pride.

However, as I thought back from time to time over the weekend, there was one aspect of the quest that caused me to reflect wistfully upon my time of life.

There were two members of our party who at different times were occasionally invited by the others to take ‘time out’ and rest from what (as already indicated) was quite strenuous activity.

The first was one of our number who suffers from a bad back and who was therefore in danger of ‘tweaking’ it whilst engaged in lifting and shifting quite heavy boxes of books.

And the second was your author. Despite my hip replacement, I try to take regular exercise and keep myself reasonably fit – (I fondly imagined) compared to anyone, never mind someone of my advanced age.

And yet twice – once at the ‘loading’ location, the other at the ‘receiving’ one – I was invited (or perhaps it was instructed) to take time out. This move was undeniably prompted by my colleagues’ concern that I wouldn’t be able to ‘keep up’ and therefore I should not only pace myself but take regular rest periods.

Why was this?

Because, compared to the rest of my platoon, I looked like a frail little old man – that’s why!