Happy Birthday to Me!
or “How have I gotten to live this long?”
As a child of the sixties I’m beating my path through middle life. It’s pretty good and I feel I’m in my prime in every sense of the word.
Women don’t scare me no matter how good looking or intelligent, the kids will always scare me because I worry about them, I have a very beautiful home and have no credit anywhere with 3 cars on the drive including my beloved 1972 MGB GT (with the chrome not the rubber and alloy spoke wheels).
Life gets even better as I’m packing the sprogs off to my ex and preparing for an assault on the golf course, having rediscovered my golf clubs at the back of the garage. I am fully intent on celebrating the 43rd anniversary of the result of my parents New Year’s Eve ‘62 nocturnal adventures. My beautiful neighbour may be slowly melting as she’s agreed to come and knock some balls around the golf course too. Do not expect anything witty or inciteful next week as I will be recovering from the abuse of the forthcoming weekend.
So before I vanish into the arms of Bacchus or God willing, the delectable Jo, here’s a word or two on why life definitely began at 40 for me.
At 38 I’d sold my business and after 6 months of scratching my bum decided I needed to do something. Plans were made, shops and property inspected, deals agreed but not entered into and a lot of travelling for pleasure made me realise that Moscow is a dump (if God was to perform colon cleansing on the world, this is where he would stick the tube), Cyprus really is great, but there is no place like home.
In a nutshell I was buggering about.
Working for a friend of mine running sales and marketing just did not make me want to hop out of bed in the morning and I was bored!
Tick Tock Tick Tock Tick Tock….and Hey Presto I’m 40 !
Bloody hell was I adrift and no amount of money in the bank was sufficient compensation for that feeling of having no purpose in life. Pleasure had become boring. Work was a chore. Life was a mess.
I’d been tinkering with an idea to train to become a maths teacher for quite some time. I’m an OU student with a fair number of credits towards the degree and I’d always been torn between being a capitalist swine and accumulating dosh against being socially responsible and giving back to society. Teaching experience was brilliant, especially at my oldest daughter’s primary school where as the only man on the premises I was an object of some curiosity. I decided against becoming a teacher because it is far too much like damnably hard work; I tried it and I know, so no wisecracks about all the holidays teachers have.
That spell did do something for me though. I started writing.
I wanted to keep a record of my experiences partially because I was advised to do so by the teacher training people, but also because I met so many really wonderful kids in the brief time I was involved and I wanted a record for myself. My daughter saw this and we started working together on some of her own school work while I disappeared off at a complete tangent and started writing stories for the children with themselves playing roles in the stories. They were a hit with the kids that got them and personally I felt pretty good doing it.
Now being a scion of the Thatcher years my brain started ticking over the possibility that actually writing was something I could do and get paid for it. What better career path to take than to be able to choose where I work, who I work for, what the subject material will be and trust me, there’s nothing better than saying you’re a writer to stir interest in the opposite sex at the dinner parties or wine bars.
Writing is growing on me rather like a wart. So far, I’ve produced pretty ugly nasty nonsense geared towards selling “stuff” but it has paid and it is getting more interesting. Over two years of key bashing, I’m becoming rather happy with my lot except there are the occasional stirrings that I could be delivering something better than “Use this Zit Cream!”. I know I’ve posted before that I am not an artist nor have any bent in that direction but it appears to me that scribbling is addictive. I have probably created over a million words of content in these two years (you work it out :10,000 words a day for 2 years) yet you don’t know my name!
So, it’s happy birthday to me and perhaps while I’m engaged in “thinking time” this weekend, I’ll come up with a cracking idea to write about and make a million or maybe not. I don’t care, I’m happy because I have my life and all the stuff I mentioned earlier, but writing has also given me that sense of purpose back and I’m very grateful.