Feeling My Age

I decided to blog for a year about feeling my age after falling over – heavily and unexpectedly – in the street last April. The plan was to post one entry for each day over the next 12 months and today I finally made it.

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Pic taken with Instagram

Pic taken with Instagram

Quick – somebody call an ambulance…

Video: bell ringing practice At St Mary’s church, Putney.

In 1647, between October 28th and November 9th, soldiers and officers of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army held discussions on the constitution and future of England in this church. They became known as The Putney Debates.

Can it really be 20 years since this hilarious Cure video by Tim Pope?
It can be and it is :-(

“Matthew” from the album BILLIE’S BONES by JANIS IAN
A song for Matthew Shepard (1976 – 1998)

Matthew
Janis Ian

Footsteps on gravel at the neighborhood bar
Things start to unravel, then they go too far
The sound of pain written on the wind
fades to grey and then goes dim…

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Photo taken with instagram

Daft joke for London rail users…
Q: how many different types of crustacean are there?
A: Four – Charing Crustacean, King’s Crustacean, New Crustacean and St. Pancrustacean…

Back in 1981 a series of TV adverts featuring Jimmy Savile proclaimed “This is The Age Of The Train” – and with ever rising oil prices  the age of the train has never gone away.  That said, thanks to John Major the taxpayer now hands over far more in subsidies to private train company shareholders each year than it would have cost to run British Rail as a public amenity on the French or German model.

But those adverts show that 30 years ago BR fares weren’t as low as you might imagine. An Awayday ticket from Birmingham to Liverpool is shown at £7.80 – whereas today theadvance fare would be £18. And that 1981 price in today’s money, according to thisismoney.co.uk, would be £26.36.

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Photo taken with Instagram
Having been mystified by the modern school playground, my son and I recently spotted this Safe Play Area of a more traditional British kind.

Photo taken with Instagram

Adding to the general child-friendly atmosphere, the entire area was cordoned off with security railings and warning signs.

Click to zoom
Along with this crumbling welcome to the premises by the Louvaine Area Residents Association.  The building itself is the derelict Church of St Peter & St Paul at 92 St John’s Hill, London – just up the road from Clapham Junction.

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Starring Clinton Moore as the Masked Man and Jay Silverheels as his faithful injun companion Tonto… “A fiery horse with the speed of light in a cloud of dust – and a hurried ‘Hi ho Silver’… the Loner Ranger rides again”. You don’t realise how much of this guff off TV sinks into your consciousness when you’re ten or eleven.

The Ranger’s catchphrase inspired the 1967 hit “Hi Ho Silver Lining”, written by American songwriters Scott English and Larry Weiss and first released in March 1967 by The Attack, followed a few days later by Jeff Beck. However the Jeff Beck version charted first, and the song is indelibly associated with him.

Strolling down Garratt Lane the other day, Child A spotted these curious structures outside Garratt Park primary school. My son was born forty years after me, yet we still have similar basic expectations of what you might find in a children’s playground: swings, slides, roundabouts, climbing frames – that sort of thing….

But WTF were these bizarre structures? [More]

Reblogged from Stoked On Science on Tumblr:

Leaving the lab late at night, I always find the light blue glow that the UV lamp sheds on the inside of the biosafety hood especially beautiful. Although, if I were some tiny bacteria that happened to land inside that hood, I doubt I’d feel very nostalgic about my mutating genome.

Just heard a chilling Radio 4 programme about ageing by Peter Day:
Download the whole programme as a podcast here

“Life expectancy is currently increasing by two, two and a half years every decade.  What that actually means is that in the course of today your  life expectancy is going to increase by 5-6  hours.  So the reality is that when the alarm clock goes off each morning we’re waking up to a 29 hour day – of which we’re going to use 24 hours now – and put a further 5 hours onto our stockpile for the future.”

“Since people aged 85 and over are the fastest-growing part of the population, we studied about a thousand of them to see whether they had any of 18 different diseases of ageing. We found there was not a single person who had nothing wrong with them – and most people had four, five or six things wrong with them. In the future medical services will need to take account of the fact that older people have lots of things going wrong together at the same time – and that the way you treat one of these conditions may have to take account of others that are present.” (Professor Tom Kirkwood, Newcastle University)

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Gradations of toast done-ness. My preference is for about 45 secs; Child K ranges between 45 secs and 1,45 min; Wife goes for a hardcore 3,15 mins every time. Plenty of scope for family dissent, depending on who’s making breakfast.

Found this on standingintheheartofdarkness via a reblog on the delightful letsjustwastetime whose author Vivien lives in Melbourne and is aged… well only click through and find out if you really, really don’t mind feeling your age:

Photo taken with Instagram

Wife just told me the silliest joke I’ve heard in ages…
Q: What do you call someone who cuts hair between two rows of houses?
A: Ali Baba.