Ralph Oswick: Senior moments
As one gets older, one develops little tics and habits that annoy or at least puzzle other people. That is, if they even notice.
Though of infinitesimal interest to anyone else, these things loom large in the life of the stakeholder.
For instance, I can’t get on a bus unless my bus pass is in the breast pocket of my shirt, even though it would be just as convenient in my wallet.
I’ve lost count of how many times it’s been through the wash.
Luckily, I use the cold cycle otherwise I would end up with a shrivelled lump of gel permanently fixed to my favourite Hawaiian number.
Realising that one spends an inordinate amount of time arranging the Diet Pepsi cans in the fridge to face outwards on Ocado day is a moment when one is glad nobody is looking. When did that start, I wonder?
And why do I hum ‘Just a Song at Twilight’ every time I boil a kettle, even if it’s eight in the morning?
Why that song? Thank goodness I’m single (one habit that I’m very happy to have developed), or my partner would have been driven nuts.
Everyone of a certain age verbalises the effort of getting up from an armchair. It’s the universal sign of agedness.
Most folks simply involuntarily emit an abstract sound to express the effort involved.
Why do I exclaim ‘Mummy!’ through my gritted teeth? I hadn’t really noticed, until one day I did it on the bus. Everyone stared.
Why is that old bloke with a walking stick and a flamingo shirt calling for his mother?
Didn’t he hold everyone up earlier, scrabbling through layers of coats and jumpers to find his bus pass?
On either side of my bed, I have a circular mahogany cabinet.
One displays my statue of the Queen Mother. The other is where every night I ritually arrange the accoutrements of a good sleep.
Water, phone and charger, alarm clock, radio, lamp, current bedtime reading, medicine, all meticulously placed so as not to fall off.
But fall off they do, especially when I stretch in vain to get something, tune the radio or check the time.
Everything is just out of reach from a prone position, resulting in shoulder cramp, tangled sheets or even an ignominious tumble onto the floor.
For a full 16 years I have been annoyed on a nightly basis, little wonder I sleep badly, but I just accepted it as one of those tedious rituals built into my life.
Until last week, when I thought, why not move the cabinet nearer the bed? So, I did just that!
Why on Earth didn’t that occur to me before? No more glasses of water sent flying, no pill bottles knocked down the back of the cabinet, no more spectacles crushed into the carpet.
A welcome relief you might think. But it’s left a gap in my life.
A little unfilled void awaiting a new ritual to stealthily invade my unsuspecting brain.