Mental health..? 17 7 20 (18) 25 1 21

Yesterday I was talking to my older brother, J, with the aid of Skype and he was telling me about his and his wife's 3 night visit to the area in which the two of us grew up, together with our younger kid sister, in the North West of England in the town of Bury. The day before I had had much the same conversation with my sister, M, who also first phoned me when I quickly replaced the receiver to get a better signal and also a cheaper call using Skype, for the first time in at least a couple of weeks with each of these two siblings...

J had told me about not visiting this pub with M and her husband B on the old Watling Street road which runs to the north of the town, a road which dates back 2000 years to Roman Britain and starts probably in London where even today there is a street named Watling St. He couldn't remember the name of the restaurant there and neither could I although we have each known of its existence these past 50 years or so...

My wife A-E and I last visited each of J and his wife Ma, and then M and B later in the week the first week in May this year and like J and Ma we didn't visit the restaurant in question either though we had the year before in 2016. So I was able to tell him he hadn’t missed anything because when we last visited we hadn't enjoyed the food nether A-E nor I who each had different dishes... In my case I told him the meat was too tough for my aging teeth and he volunteered that perhaps I'd have been better with a minced meat dish something like Shepherd's Pie though my elder brother has himself a perfect set of teeth with so far the loss of only one wisdom tooth not through decay but because it grew crookedly or some such reason maybe 20 years ago...

But J has had white hair this past 50 years whilst mine is only just beginning to grey: as I stood in our English bath just now taking a shower I looked across the room to the bathroom mirror above the wash-hand basin without my spectacles looking at my handsome frame through the mist, the frame 10 stones dead or thereabouts, 63,1 kg, the weight I was at 20 years of age with my thinning hair lying flat on my head backwards and looking with blurred vision without my bifocals especially darker than in reality, reflecting how brother J still doesn’t wear glasses for distance I got to thinking how much of our conversations these days are about the aging process. But J is very active for a man 16 months my senior: out cycling first thing every morning for an hour and still playing badminton once or twice a week with his Lions’ friends whereas in a morning I just sit here at my pc writing my blog reading the English newspapers online, The Guardian from UK, and the New York Times some articles if they particularly attract my eye… before the afternoons when I too take my daily constitutional walk…

Walking round our small town conspicuous to everyone because I always carry a small rucksack on my back these past 5 years or so to carry the daily shopping for my as opposed to A-E’s meals, usually buying the oranges we share though A-E sometimes buys oranges too, plus my towel and swimming trunks I sometimes need if there are many people of mixed sex nearby where we swim in the sea. And when I can still turn an eye or two from young ladies unaware of my biological age whilst the vast majority keep their eyes to the ground or away in another direction so that we needn’t exchange glances etc., etc., etc.

It was then as I departed our house for this 1 to 2 hours of exercise yesterday that I uttered the words: “Best time of the day!” then shortly afterwards “The Pack Horse!”, that’s the name of the pub/restaurant on Watling Street coming to me in a flash from nowhere! Have a good day everyone and thank goodness for all the pills one has to take for under-active thyroid gland, etc., etc., etc., as I hope you too get to retain some if not all the youthful features you once had as your aging process sets in in earnest, hahaha.