On the morning of my 35th birthday, I woke up with a pulsing pain in my hip. “Come on,” I silently implored the scriptwriters of the universe, “this plot twist is a bit on the nose.” I had been fretting about my birthday for months, not helped by the friend who characterised the second half of the Biblical three-score-and-ten like this: “Welcome to the downslope.”
I didn’t feel entitled to much sympathy, however, as my partner has been hobbling round the house for weeks with an inflamed sciatic nerve painful enough to require a visit to A&E. And it was, as ever, a reminder of how disgustingly healthy I am the rest of the time. Getting older means I no longer take wellness for granted; just as I’m now happy every time my parents incompetently FaceTime me – “where have you GONE/which button did you press, Reg?” – and they seem to be physically OK and relatively sane.
Content from our partners
