The More Things Change....

To be honest I don't think I have ever understood the french saying that goes "the more things change, the more they stay the same".  This is not my experience.  Today were delivered two what my Mother and her friends would have called zimmer frames.  I don't remember what they are called currenmtly but something a bit less stark, I suspect, or something with less negative connotations. Anyway, there are two whatevers, one for upstairs and one for down. The idea is to do all possible to save me from yet another fall, of which there have been rather too many of late. Mind you, getting off the bed, stumbling to reach the frame and propelling it and me to the bathroom in the middle of the night may just prove as counter-productive as crawling there on my hands and knees would be.  Actually, though, it's not the mobility-aid aspect of it which gets to me as much as the overwhelming feeling of witch-like old age.  Come on now, you know  what I mean.  There am I, at five foot three instead of the five foot six I used to be, crouched over a contraption that automatically in imagination turns ones hair iron grey and adds a hump to the erstwhile smooth sweep of the prideful carriage of  previous years: indeed, of the day before yesterday.

Somewhere there is a goblin-like close relative of the Wizard of Cyberspace engaged with him in a deadly race to see who can bring me to  my knees with the most profound humiliation and the direst evidence that nothing that changes stays the same.  Take appetite: I am used to being as hearty a trencherwoman as the next.  Now I look at my breakfast soft bolied egg and half a banana and work out how soon I can push the plate away and be done with this eating business, even for the time being..  Even a pub Sunday roast stopped appealing when the experience moved from my eyes to my taste buds. Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, they make me drool just to think of them.  Eating them has the opposite effect as in ' how soon can I leave all this and go quietly home for a bar of choclolate.'. Along with the walking frames came a pole or two which were to be applied on the side of the staircase where there was no indigenous banister or other aid to the unstable.  These poles turned out to  be of untreated wood, a long way from splinter-free with spidery wisps of un-smoothed wood where a polished end piece may have been expected.  I was on my knees sweeping up the sawdust left by this installation when I realised this was not a job for someone who had need of an extra hand rail, the one precluding the other, and I had better tolerate the mess than find myself stuck on the staircase unable to move on no matter how many hand rails were there to assist me..I conclude there is only one solution to an otherwise impossible situation: change the name of the blog from "75 going on 40" to "Methuselah going on  two years old". Prynhawn da.