Brooding rituals help keep the evil spirits at bay – but can’t stop my next chapter
I’VE always leaned towards hypochondria, just to be on the safe side. No point assuming you are well just because you feel in the whole of your health.
Is that tickly cough just that? Or something more sinister… you know, life threatening?
Being suspicious has served me well. Anticipating the worst has somehow kept the evil spirits at bay.
I get my regular check-ups like a sensible grown-up, husband, father and grandfather. Bloods, blood-pressure and the like. These rituals reassure me in the short term. Then I brood again.
I mean, is this new tickly cough not different than the last one?
Then a few months back I did develop something. A little thing that nagged, would go and come back. At this stage it’s a constant nuisance, eating into the quality of everyday life. Time to do something.
So now I’ve been referred to a consultant by my
GP and have an appointment to get some routine tests done.
No big deal. A bit of prep and fasting the day before and then this scoping exercise to find out if it’s this, that or the other.
I hope it’s not the other. I have no reason to believe it is, but I’m a hypochondriac and feel it’s my job to fret a little. My family expects it.
But that’s not what’s really niggling me.
What really set me thinking was how this is a new chapter. A chapter, it must be acknowledged, that is closer to the back of the book than the front.
Because this is the first time in my blessed adult life that I’ve had to deal with anything that couldn’t be sorted with a Panadol and a duvet day. Assuming this ailment is sorted, will it mean long-term medication, or dietary adjustments? Might there be an operation?
In other words, is this the first stage of being old? Am I on the slippery slope to a life of meds, midday naps, Complan and people shouting at me because they assume I’m deaf as well as gaga? That tickly cough wasn’t so bad after all, was it?
A job for life is not good for graduates
WHEN they say a job in the public service is for life, they really mean it. Now more than ever. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe is raising the compulsory retirement age to 70 for those State workers who were recruited before 2004. This is to avoid the situation where 65-yearold retirees are forced to go on the dole or seek alternative work to bridge the year-long gap before they can start collecting their pensions at 66. All very sensible as far as it goes.
Nobody wants to be ageist, but look at it from the point of view of that much-maligned millennial fresh out of college.
Because the inevitable drip-down consequence of this move is to close off level-entry jobs in the public and civil service for the young, eager and, most likely, flat-broke twentysomething.
They couldn’t be blamed for looking enviously, or indeed with indignation, at that haveit-all generation of people who own the sort of houses they will never be able to afford, have the sort of pensions that millennials could only dream of and have also managed to squirrel away treasure troves in savings.
Now they see Generation Greedy cling on to jobs they don’t need for another five years, if they so wish.
These graduates might even, in a moment of private bitterness, wonder what these time-servers, dozing towards cushioned retirement Nirvana, can possibly offer the State that they don’t.
A bit harsh perhaps, but who could blame them?
England likeable, in spite of Brexit
THE English football team has long been a byword for under-achievement. Throw in hooliganism, bling, Wags, bad haircuts and you have a sorry roll-call.
Now, as the folly of bonkers Brexit becomes undeniable, the decency and likeability of this current World Cup team has become our neighbour’s finest saving grace.
Only a misanthrope could wish them ill tomorrow.