Tuesday 30 March 2010

Getting old - I love it..!

I'm enjoying myself more in my seventies than I think in any decade except possibly my thirties - but it's a lot to do with stopping drinking (and so smoking). Not being hungover the next morning means that you can do all the stuff you like doing without the secret voice telling you that you only have to hang on until one o'clock and its okay to have a drink. 
And this was funny because it wasn't other people you were behaving for but that old slave driver, the protestant work ethic...How can anyone have a three hour lunch with the PWE. 
I remember when I went to California and was nominally living with a girl I'd met at the airpot (I think, I've no idea of her name but have no reason to suppose she didn't have one. She was from one of the desert states).
 After a couple of months nodding at her as she was getting up and I was going to bed, I suggested we should get to know each other better and so would come down to wherever she worked to have lunch - two or three hours and a few bottles of wine.
She was adamant, said it wasn't possible - she only got thirty eight minutes for lunch! On hearing this I decided, there and then, to go back to Europe - I didn't want to live in a society where people had thirty eight minutes for lunch. 
Because you can turn forty minutes into an hour and then two hours but thirty eight was the outcome of bargaining and calculation and so stayed thirty eight minutes...I went back to Europe. 

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