Koh Lanta, Thailand May 2013
"Having just looked back ten years, can I realistically look forward ten further years? Another decade? Exactly the same span of time. That would bring me to 2023. But will I get there? Will I ever reach my seventieth birthday? Somehow I doubt it. Death will probably come to find me before then. But if fortune gives me ten more years, I guess I need to start thinking even more urgently about how I will use those years. I don't want to squander the time, I want to live it. These precious ten years ahead will pass all too quickly as the past ten years have proven and only then will this random blogging cease my friends. Only then will this Yorkshire pudding be totally digested. Till then I'll keep on keeping on."
I wrote those words in this blog ten years ago - back in May 2013. The early deaths of several male members of my family has always limited my own expectations of a long life. But now, as I approach my seventieth birthday later this year I feel healthy and vigorous with the feeling that I have got a lot more living left to do. Perhaps I will make it to eighty after all. One more decade.
Then I will live to see three grandchildren reach the age of reason - their pre-adulthood. I would like that - especially as both of my grandfathers were dead before I was born. It always felt like a yawning hole in my experience of my life. But hopefully Phoebe and the two unborn babes will be able to remember me.
In Great Britain, the current life expectancy for a man is 79.0 years and for a woman it is 82.9 years. That should give me extra hope that I can live for another decade. By the way, the average life expectancy for a man in the USA is 74.5 years and for a woman it is 80.2 years. In Australia it is 81.3 years for a man and 85.4 years for a woman.
Of course those are broad brushstroke national figures. Poverty, diet, housing and healthcare have a massive impact upon life expectancy in every nation on this planet. Another key factor is smoking tobacco. I was one of four brothers but now there are just two of us. The two who died were both lifelong smokers but the two who survive are non-smokers.
Please don't tell me that I am being morbid or that I should think positive and lighten up. I don't need such platitudes when I am being pragmatic and clear-sighted about my mortality.
So many of us prefer to wear blinkers when contemplating our own deaths, trying to block the only inevitability there is from our thinking. When the roofers have left our house this weekend I will be going up their scaffolding to paint the rendering on our house - on all four sides. It is a horrible, slow job involving plenty of dabbing in the gaps between the pebbles but at least I know that I will never have to do it again.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/M7uVEs3
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