Growing old with Gere..?

We had rather a late night last night. One of those rare occasions when the kids are packed off to my mother-in-law’s for a sleepover. A few years ago an evening to ourselves might have been spent down the pub, a few games of pool, many pints of beer, followed by a night of passion and a late lie-in with bacon butties and copious amounts of tea.

But age is catching up with us. We went for a sedate meal, drank a couple of bottles of wine and were in bed fast asleep before midnight – desperate really to make the most of a night of uninterrupted sleep.

For poor Bill however it was not to be an uninterrupted night of sleep. Eating rich food and drinking too much sauvignon blanc so close to bedtime left him tossing and turning and resorting to sitting in front of the cricket at four in the morning, lamenting the slow rate at which his aging body now digests food and drink which his younger body could have brushed off without so much as a belch.

So this is what the future holds – even those nights when we are footloose and kiddie-free we will have to indulge in measured moderation for fear of the repercussions on our aging bodies.

This morning I dragged my own aging body, creaking at the knees and woozy in the head to the kitchen to make that life-restoring first brew of the day. Bending down to get the milk from the fridge I had to do a double take. For on the bottom shelf of the fridge, sandwiched between a wooden board and some cling-film was Bill’s Silver Spoon. Now I’m not talking teaspoons here, this wasn’t some absent minded placing of the spoon in the fridge with the milk. But The Silver Spoon – ‘the most influential and successful cook book in Italy’ according to Amazon (my Italian ex-brother-in-law apparently disputes this claim, but my good friend from Naples, a keen chef, would side with Amazon).

Anyway, we are digressing from the point (another sign of an aging and rambling mind?). There it was on the bottom shelf, chilling nicely next to the cheese and crème fraiche, and I decided that this must definitely be the first sign of dementia. Putting your cookbooks in the fridge is surely up there with using denture glue to clean your teeth? (Which is what I saw my Grandmother do once during the onset of her Alzheimer’s).

Of course not all signs of aging are necessarily problematic. Bill visited the hairdressers this week and was told by the hairdresser that he had a lovely thick head of hair and it was unlikely he was ever going to go bald.
‘That’s as maybe,’ he replied, ‘but my wife’s waiting for me to go grey’.
(There’s something about grey hair, don’t you think?)
‘Ah!’ replied the knowledgeable hairdresser, ‘the Richard Gere look. Yes, a lot of women want their men to go grey like Richard Gere.’
‘I guess so,’ he replied.

There was a pause.

She snipped around the nape of his neck then progressed the conversation with another observation: ‘Only not many of them actually do, do they?’
‘What?’
‘End up looking like Richard Gere?’ she said.
‘I guess not.’

Very wise that hairdresser, clearly not losing her marbles yet. Unlike me and my sweet William.

The cookbook by the way was to flatten some pork belly. Gordon Ramsay’s idea apparently. Now there’s a man bordering on madness, and those wrinkles…