Entry for June 16, 2007

I am old. It is now official. I thought that I would wait until I was forty next month before I became old. I thought I still had another few weeks of youthful vigour, a final evening of an Indian summer where I could leap like a young stag in the light of the setting sun. But I'm afraid that has been denied to me.
Here is how I know that I am old. I had a day out with the boys today. Once, this might have meant a day of boozing, perhaps a trip to the football, some gambling, maybe even some pub where we could fail miserably to engage in conversation with women - youthful, vigorous pursuits of young men in their prime. But no more.
My day out today was a trip to The World Badminton Championships Just the sort of thing that Oliver Reid would have done in his heyday eh? A real man's day out, on a par with big game fishing and bullfighting - I believe Ernest Hemmingway's lost novel was "Shuttlecocks in the Dust" - a slim volume full of anecdotes of the manly deeds of the real heroes who wielded wooden rackets back in the thirties.
We even started our day with coffee and biscuits. Honestly. Morning coffee. We may even have had a bit of a gossip. We have actually managed to miss out middle age. We have leapt straight from our youth to become elderly women.