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Picture this ...
You're heading down the fast lane of life's great highway - or at least you're overtaking some slower moving cretins on a suburban by-pass - and suddenly you've reached 40 years of age with seemingly no effort at all.
You still have hair, your teeth, most of your relations are still alive, and your mates have just bought you a silver engraved tankard for your 40th birthday - even if they did get your middle names wrong.
Life seems good, you have your own business, a nice house, have your own choice of car, and no-one to tell you what to do or how to do it - apart from your wife of 14 years and your two daughters, who all take turns at nagging you to no avail - you have mastered the art of selective deafness.
So what if you're 40 ? Its all been easy so far, just keep on doin' what your doin', you're not even halfway there yet, and like the Kids from Fame you're going to live forever.
Then suddenly a few people that you know start dying, you find that year on year you are attending more and more funerals, until by your 45th birthday you've lost both parents, an uncle, two business partners and several work colleagues, and you know of more than one old school pal who has turned in his library cards.
You stop and think, "Maybe, just maybe I'm a little more than halfway there now, I should manage another 30 years though surely ? But then again I've been on this road a long time - are we nearly there yet ?"
Suddenly there is a great compulsion to leave something behind - it'll be your life's chronicle, and you can keep adding to it for the next 45 years if you wish, but if the bus stops tomorrow and you find that you've arrived at the terminus, then at least you might have left a flavour of what it was like being you rather like a huge pile of dog muck smeared all over a pavement long after the dog has been dragged away on its chain by the owner, people will look and say
"What the hell sort of a dog left that ?"
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