Friday, March 7, 2014

Feeling The Strain

For some reason I'm surprised at the degree to which this old frame of mine has been feeling the strain these last few days. There really shouldn't be any sensation of novelty at all about this since I've been here before, with reasonable frequency. Yet somehow the mind within the body manages to forget just how battered that body can feel on occasion. Goodness knows what it would be like if I had any kind of genuinely demanding physical work to do, but somehow walking from classroom to classroom, climbing a few stairs and carrying one or two books leaves me as tired as going eight rounds in the ring with a particularly handy sparring partner.

Yesterday morning I was hit by a back twinge of fairly substantial proportions before the day even got started and it took a good hour of moving in slow motion (and sitting down) before systems returned to anything like normal.

Age isn't just catching up anymore; it long since overtook me and left me trailing behind, like one of those runners who gets lapped time and again but keeps circling because there's no way of exiting the track unobtrusively. I know this all sounds ridiculously self-pitying, but you'll have to forgive me because I've been reading Lear for much of the week and if you can't be a self-pitying old geezer after that, then when can you?

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