Age is a sneaky bastard!

Age is a sneaky bastard! Throughout early childhood you strive for more of it, impatiently awaiting the next birthday to click another year onto your gauge and leave infancy trailing in your slipstream. During adolescence the desire to get older becomes more urgent. As a 14-year-old schoolboy I would dream each night about Janet in the Lower 6th Form (or Year 12 as it is now called), her moist breath on my neck, my hand stroking her silky thigh. But sadly it was all fantasy; as she was 3 years my senior I didn't stand a chance, her sexual desires apparently being satiated by a hairy builder in his early 20s who would often wait for her at the school-gates.
Around the age of 18 something remarkable happens. Age changes its position. Until this point you have been vainly chasing it, struggling in its wake, not quite being able to catch up with it. But as you enter the era of legal drinking, Age executes a devious manoeuvre. Imperceptibly, it allows you to overtake it before  crouching immediately behind you. Constantly in your shadow, you can't see it and are unaware of its presence. Through the next 25 years you rarely even think about it, complacently unaware of advancing years and the impostor on your tail sniggering silently to itself as it anticipates the great reveal   Then at some point, typically around your mid 40s, the bounder lurches from its hiding place, stands brazenly in front of you and screams, "You're old!" Stunned by this revelation you check yourself out in a full-length mirror. The bastard's right! The hair is greying, and receding a bit at the sides. Your smile reveals yellowy stumps where once there were sparkling pillars of ivory. Chest hair no longer shouts "this is a proper man" but is overly long and meandering, as if confused, specked with white, and instead seems to mumble, "has been". Emerging below this wild shrubbery, your gut swells like a giant, puss-filled abscess.

More intimate examination leads to further disappointments. You've lost your arse, your once steely buttocks re-molded into flattened discs so as to render any style of trouser baggy. Worse, your manhood resembles a slug that has endured three boil-wash cycles in your Hotpoint automatic. And as for your balls, they are swinging so low it is a wonder they don't mimic a pair of depth-charges when you sit on the toilet.

Yes, the passage of time is unrelenting. I am now 53 years old. But increasing age not only changes our physical appearance, it also impacts on our feelings and perceptions, sometimes making us experience day-to-day events in peculiar ways. It is these experiences I would like to share with you by means of this blog.

I will regularly describe specific aspects of my day-to-day life that seem indicative of that sneaky bastard called Age making mischief with my thoughts, emotions and behaviour. I hope you enjoy reading them. I would greatly appreciate your comments on anything that I write. Also, I would be delighted if anyone wishes to share their own experiences relating to menopausal man. Maybe you've found yourself reacting in a way  (to your wife, son, daughter, work colleague) that brings home to you the fact that you are getting older? Or perhaps you've experienced a surprising emotional reaction to a comment or situation that would, in your younger days, have been commonplace and benign? Please share them with me on this blog. Although the focus is on the male psyche, I don't want to exclude the female of the species. So ladies, please feel free to post your observations about the men in your life, their ways and idiosyncracies, that suggest that they've reached that "funny age."

Thank you for reading Bryan Jones Diary.