Ageing, for example, seems terribly unfair. It just gets done to you. There you are, carrying on as normal, minding your own business, sitting in the sun, metaphorically, perhaps having a meditative smoke, and age gets dumped all over your head like the evacuations of some enormous baleful vulture.
You bumble along, living in the eternal present and all your past is a rubbish tip of fragmentary memories, a heap of broken images, so the experience of being 45 is pretty much identical to being 15 except suddenly your back aches, and your knees crack when you get up and you can’t do long division any more (it’s just gone) and you have to be told what “chav” means and the locked box of humiliations seems much heavier and the entitled young sneer at you and you find yourself reading things like this:
– Do you think you could write a TV script? (Yes!)
– Do you fancy a change in career? (Yes! Yes!)
-Are you aged between 16 and 26? (No! – Weeps)
Middle-aged Male Anorexic 