The autumn of my life

First of all I should apologise for the brief hiatus in posting.  All I can say by way of an excuse is that I have been ill (although I’ve only just been to the doctors today to establish how ill).  Of course prior to going to the doctors I had a dalliance with internet-powered self-diagnosis.  I don’t wish to blow my own trumpet, (I don’t own one, but my son has a xylophone – so I suppose I could knock out a tune on that), but I managed to successfully establish that I had contracted shingles.

I went to the doctors and he agreed with my diagnosis (I think he was secretly very impressed when I said “I think I might have shingles”).   That was the start and end of the doctor’s efforts. Maybe he was trying to test my knowledge to see if I knew the possible treatment options?  I asked if there was anything I should take for it and he said I could take anti viral drugs to contain the effects a little.  Of course I would take them, thanks for letting me know there was something out there.  Did he want me to go and look up the anti-viral options online maybe, I’m not sure, but he did eventually write a prescription out for me.

My wife is 36 weeks pregnant and my son hasn’t had chickenpox yet, so I asked the doctor about these two concerns – perfectly reasonable I thought.  I had to illicit the answers from him again through expert questioning.  It’s a good job I’ve read a few detective novels in my time, as this assisted me in coming up with a good strategy for asking the right questions.  I’m currently reading a book (Transitions – Iain Banks) which includes a lot of torture episodes.  I pondered whether removing his fingernails with pliers would elicit the right answers but dropped the idea when I realised that I didn’t have any pliers on me, then again why would I, I’m a marketer, not a plumber.   Marketers would make for rubbish torturers, they’d ask far too many vague questions and then over-analyse the results.  Now your plumber, he’s more likely to over-promise and under-deliver, which isn’t good news for the person being tortured…

I digress, but the point (if there is one) was that I might as well have done the whole job online.  Why bother with the intermediary, in this instance the doctor, who added no value to my experience?   If the chemist was able to write up a prescription I would have been sorted pronto.  I’m not saying get rid of doctors, but I just don’t rate my own.

Whilst I was pondering what the cause for the pain on my left shoulder and the left side of my chest was, I did start thinking a little morbidly.  Well, the point inside me that connected the two pain points is my heart after all and I am a man so I think the worst.  This pondering made me question where in my life I had got to.  People say things like “he’s entering the autumn of his life” or “she’s in the spring of her youth”, so I wondered which month I was in, I wanted more precision than a season.  If it was going to be my last month I’d like to go out in a decent month, not January.

I’ve given this a little thought and if you do equate your life to a year, then you don’t start in January.  That’s a cold, drab and painful month – so that’s got to be near the end you’d think.  My thinking is that life starts in the Spring, March specifically.  Which therefore means I’m probably (hopefully) in the October of my life (the autumn of my life if you’re being unspecific).

The leaves are turning red and falling from the trees and my hair is falling out slowly, although it hasn’t turned red.  Mind you, I don’t think that would be a problem – in fact I think the whole anti-red-head thing is unwarranted and bigoted.  I don’t know when it became acceptable to pick on a group based on their colour, but seemingly red-heads are the exclusion that proves the rule.

Anyway, apologies for the lack of marketing content here, but I’m not well!