Tickets, Money, Passport?

It's a bit of a tradition my mother started when my sister and I were small that when it was our respective birthdays we would have a photo taken with all our presents. It's a tradition I have resurrected, albeit without me in it, in recent years. This year's cache of gifts and cards was rather impressive and I put it down to my canny decision to invite everyone I know to the pub to celebrate, and commiserate with me, my advancing years. As I had hoped they were sweetened very much by the attendance of friends and receipt of cards, gifts and drinks and for that I will be very grateful.

Age is a funny thing and one that I am quite reconciled with on many levels although perhaps less so on others. I've always maintained I look forward to being old. You can stop caring - some would say I've done that already - and you can be comfortable in yourself which was something that as a younger person and a teen I hated. Not having opinions and experiences of my own I was impatient for things to happen. It's probably why I start so many conversations with 'when I did' or 'when I was' etc.

Still it's hard not to compare yourself to others and wonder about the choices you have made, continue to make and the opportunities that came your way. Have you achieved all that you could have, have you done the things you wanted to? Getting older means you're very aware that, cliche though it is, time is slowly moving on. On a work level the only way to stop myself going a little bit insane as to my 'career' is to know that I have worked only full-time for about 15 years yet am just under 30 years away from retirement - and goodness knows how old we'll be when we get to retire. So that's 2/3 of your working life ahead to make things happen. Not that I will of course.

But getting older is fascinating in so many other ways. I am bemused by the changes in my body, the way I carry extra weight and where I carry it. The downward shift of skin, the new lines and the grey hair. Though the latter has been a feature of my life for many years it hardly counts. I take for granted that I've never really needed to exercise or to take too much care of my health but as I get older I find I am starting to want to make more of an effort where my health is concerned. But as for looking older, I can't worry too much about it because it's all pretty much out of my control. Instead I look at it like an experiment where I happen to be the crash test dummy and somewhere out there is my control group - my reverse Dorian Grey if you will.