Old (er) Age is it's Own Adventure!

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Am I alone in getting older and feeling more and more separated from the society I live in? And especially playing by its set of boring and tedious rules?

For example: others around me happily separate their trash into as many different sub-species of crap as the local council suggests; not I; the lot goes into one bag and into the big dumper outside the back door of the council flats. (Sound of hands being slapped together…goodbyeee and f---k you!).

All the older folk around me go on trips to the coast..”bracing walk along the prom, dear - do you good, and a nice cup of tea after…” Nice cup of tea? puhleeze: luke-warm water in a miniscule cup with a tea bag in it. Or they meet for bingo once a week, cribbage, the café klatch, the annual Xmas dinner. They seem to have fun. What’s wrong with me that the idea of any of this leaves me feeling completely repulsed and getting onto youporn.com, or even Facebook to amuse myself??

They look askance at me. I have an occasional girl friend 25 years younger than myself. She also has a husband my age and a lover in T---- three years younger. Between the three of us, we seem to do a manful job of keeping a smile on her face. She says the old man pays the bills, the Yank is her “escape,” and I am her sex god. Well, I have the best of it don’t you agree? Although paying £40 a pop for three Viagra was getting a bit irksome, until they recently opted to supply them on prescription, figuring, I suspect, that this should substantially increase the incidents of cardiac arrest among elderly patients and they would be shut of them. Sometimes the NHS gets it right.

And I hate everybody. Is that nice or am I mad? All the ugly little gobs flapping with their inane opinions about everything: the weather, money, the government, their infirmities! Flap flap flap this week about the “rich and the poor.” Don’t they ever think that it’s all been said before, for the last 5,000 years or so? Pick up a diary with Dr. Johnston’s musings 400 years ago, or whatever it was, and he is complaining about prices, student unrest and the gap between the rich and the poor getting wider. Isn’t talk cheap? None of them actually do anything about it, it takes a Lenin, or a Fidel to motivate people. All we have in Britain are mattress-munching Mandleson’s, and Tony Bliars. Along now with the Vicar of Braylib, Nick Clegg. (Isn’t that an attractive name…Clegg, sounds like a lump of cow-shit).

Do you notice that not one of these people getting £100,000 per month, or per week, or whatever other obscene amount/period, actually say, “Hey, chaps, I really don’t need £50,000 quid a day to live; really we don‘t, do we Posh? I could give some to you if you need it. Take the BBC, for example, when they found the draconian fee was to be frozen for 6 years, they immediately wailed, “Oh! Will we be able to maintain our high standard of programming now?” Instead of, Yes, Mr Cameron and the British people, we do very well thank you and our executives don’t actually need £500,000 a year - much as they might want it - and more, so we are cutting their ridiculous salaries by 20% for the next six years, along with slashing the some £80,000 a week stars like Ross have been getting in half. Also, no more license fees for state pensioners and other assorted losers.

All the bonuses from bankers should be paid directly into the public purse. They have decent salaries; work in comfortable surroundings with plenty of opportunities to arrange copulation with work-mates; no need to join Plenty of Fish, like the marginalized. This should be enough without huge bonuses, and wouldn’t they feel worthy if this money went to single parents, out-of-work basket-cases and bingo-playing cotton buds? You would, you know.

We have become far too spoiled in this country. And the worst is, it has not made us an happier, in fact, for most, the reverse seems to hold true. Take a country like…mmmm…Mexico for example. 25% unemployed or underemployed. No free health service. No unemployment benefits or practically any help from the State.

Yet Mexicans are, on the whole, happy people, certainly more so than the dour, crabby, self-centred and moaning citizens that make up a huge part of the British public. Of course, the sun does shine over there which is an enormous help. And things like utilities are low - really low; so are rents and basic foodstuffs. What is the good of giving state pensioners in the UK (note my bias!) about £600 a month and then taking it all back in power, water, phone and petrol bills, not to mention the escalating price of groceries? They seem to go up while I watch in my local Tesco. Bus passes: bah! Give us affordable little cars (India), petrol affordable by the poorer (the USA), and FREEZE THE PRICES ON BASIC FOODSTUFFS…NOW! No almost-free tortillas and bread rolls in the UK.

So here I am flapping my gob and giving you my inane opinions. Darn! I meant to take another direction: sometimes, the quill has a mind of its own, doesn’t it?

Trouble with me is I am an anarchist. In fact, I love the word, don’t you, has a self-empowering sound to it. Like atheist, or arachnid. Spiders must be proud to be able to say, “I am not your common or garden insect, I am an arachnid; watch out for me.” In fact, they do seem to have a sort of personal arrogance about the way they conduct themselves, even the tiny ones. Must give one confidence and a sense of self-importance to drop suddenly on your silk rope a few inches and watch a huge, amorphous lump, a million times bigger than you, go screaming into another huge space, “Help…it’s a SPIDER!” After that, a muscular, fat blowfly, or even a once-feared wasp is nothing. And the fun you can have hiding from the panicked lumps! Just listen to them, “It was here, on my computer, I saw it…move the computer, John…what do you mean, you move it? What sort of a man are you to be scared of a little…THERE IT IS, PEEPING FROM BEHIND THE PRINTER, Oh! It’s huge!” Satisfying crashing and mewling sounds as the Acer tower falls onto the cat. Spider climbs leisurely behind the picture of brave American pioneers heading west, where he lives…“Ah, me, nothing like being an arachnid!”

Or being an anarchist, I suppose. Time to take the trash down to the dumper again: well, I have to throw the old Acer tower somewhere - not to mention the squashed cat.

I dedicate this silly hub to my good friends I have met on hub pages.

Robert Challen as Diogenes,