FALLING APART AT THE SEAMS

Getting old - bag of shite.

It really is.

In my head I can do the stuff I did in my 20’s without thinking about it. In reality I can’t. Such as trying to run like fuck to stop a traffic warden from putting a ticket on my car a hundred yards up the hill. Fucked a ligament in my knee, didn’t I?

And it wasn’t even a sprint – it was a laboured lumbering lurch in his general direction. Arrived at my car wincing in pain and panting and pleading with this fucker in a hat with the brim pulled down onto his nose. I got there before he started writing the ticket, saving myself 60 quid. So the pain and disability over the past three weeks has been worth it.

Had I sprained my knee AND got a ticket – that would have really ruined my day. I was fifteen minutes over, so I was taking the piss. But for once I got away with it.

So for most of November I’ve been limping around like an old biddy. Can’t help thinking my earlier rant about mobility chairs has come round and bitten me in the ass.

I’ve been holding commuters up in the rush hour on station steps, as I negotiate them one at a time like some frail old soul. It’s fucking pathetic. If anyone on the tube offers me their seat and going to deck them.

It’s a bastard, growing old.

I’ve always been ugly, but age has now given me the dubious privilege of being bald fat AND ugly.

I’ve now got more hair growing out of my ass than I have on my head.

It used to be that when I woke up in the morning, I’d be very stiff – in the toilet area. These days, when I get up, pretty much everything else is stiff apart from the nob.

I have to come up for air when tying my boots up. Which is why I’ve taken to slip-ons.

Once, when I wasn’t even old – around 1995 in my late 30’s – I went to see The Verve play at Camden Town Hall (this was their first incarnation, before they split up and then got back together with all that ballady shit). I was at the bar getting a pint of some shitty fizz, and the girl asked if I was an A&R scout or something. I said no, why? She said, “because you’re older than everyone else here – I thought you might be a record company bloke.”

I promptly told her to fuck off.

Why do kids think older people have never done anything? They walk around wearing Led Zeppelin T-shirts thinking they are the shit, and not realising that us old fuckers were there when it happened, and had the original T-shirt, but it rotted with sweat and ended up being used to wipe oil off the Cortina’s dipstick. Just because I can’t get into my two-tone 32 inch bell bottom loon pants anymore, doesn’t mean I can’t dig rock and roll. I listen to lots of new shit. I love some of the stuff I listened to as a kid in the 70s, but I’m always up for something that’s happening now. I hope to be the old fucker at the gig that everyone looks at because he’s about 60 years older than anyone else there. I’m going to dive into the mosh pit with my Zimmer.

Fuck ‘em.

Yours, Bill Turnip