Old Age Adventure

Dear George,

Today I became fascinated by looking at all the really old people and trying to imagine what they looked like when they were young.  I found it totally impossible, like old people are a different species to everyone else.  I couldn't even picture them as people in their forties, when they'd be full of comparative youth and vigour.  I could not even guess how their faces would have looked then.  I find it hard enough to recognise myself in the mirror sometimes and I've had time to get used to the cruel sculptor's chisel of age, although to be fair it's more like the sculptor has tried to stick some extra bits of clay on, and sanded down the top of my head to a shiny polished finish.  The more I thought about it I realised that we're all statues, once we were perfect marble creations but over time we become the statues that have stayed out too long in the park that have no one to tend to us and we're corroded and coated in bird shit, that morphs us into unrecognisable grey mockeries of ourselves.

I find it hard to imagine a time when I'll be 70 or 80 and I wonder if the people who waddle slowly around Sainsburys' on a tuesday morning gave it much thought either.  It's odd because I can just about look at young people and imagine them old, but just like the ageing process itself, I can't reverse it and iron out the wrinkles to turn the old young again.  To think that that old chap in the cardigan walking painfully slow down the milk and margarine isle was once a jack the lad who didn't give a monkeys about old people.

Why God, why do you make things so?  How could an eternal, unchanging and unageing being even think up such an idea? Why curse us in a way that you could never be cursed?  How did it even cross your mind to be so cruel?  You have a twisted sense of humour, oh Lord.  Can perfection create such imperfection?  Damn you God for making me this way!  Why!?  Why can't we live forever?

The weather here is a pleasant 17*C, there is a chance it'll rain tomorrow.  My train ran on time, although there was no where to sit!  A first class stamp costs 60p

Take care buddy,
Yours,
Little Dave