When you get "old" you're not allowed to ...

Hrududu wrote: »

I miss climbing trees

My oulfella was climbing trees in his 70's so... Don't ask. I still climb trees when I can. Very therapeutic it is too. Nestling in the bough of a big chestnut, or better yet an old oak. Your conifers can be easier, but not as relaxing IME. Basically, keep climbing trees*.

Leather jackets. This is a moment not unlike when Uncle Monty says in Withnail and I "It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, "I will never play the Dane." So too there comes an age where you realise a leather jacket looks... well, like you're just trying too damned hard. Kudos to Tom Cruise who can still pull that off at 50, but 35 year old Neil from human resources? No. You can start to wear one again, if your a 70 year old ex fighter pilot, or a long standing biker whose colours are stained with blood, beer and bile, but otherwise, sorry nope. Unless you're Lemmy, in which case play on.

Shorts. Nope. Nope. Triple nope. If you're a 30+ tubby bloke, usually balding early, revealing ears that cry out for the plastic surgeons sewing kit, shorts make your already stumpy legs look like you've been involved in an unfortunate encounter with a combine harvester.

Grooving(black mark right there) to tunez that are hip with 18 year olds. Nope, much of what being 18 is about, is well being 18 and scary to those that are 30+. If you're 43? Ehhhhh.

Lusting after 20 year olds. Shít they were dumbfounding and scary and unfathomable enough when you were 20, so it makes zero sense to think they might be a good plan now that you're 30+. Never mind that even if by some freak of the universe(and subdued lighting in a pub way past your cup of cocoa), you happen to pull one of the ones with an Electra complex and too many vodka and redbulls, her mates will inevitably enquire "oh I see your da came to bring you home". Ask me how I know. Not. :D She was cool, I needed me head read.

Then again, hitting 30 and thinking "oh... waistcoats are cool" is to be avoided too. As is "letting yourself go". Or avoiding all new things like "they were better in my day". Nope, they weren't. Well... sometimes they were. Today's Beatlemania is One Direction. Good fcuking Jesus. To think back in the day I once derided Duran Duran fans. They were an actual band, who wrote and played their own stuff and had a lead singer with lungs and some cracking tracks.

TL;DR? Don't limit yourself, however know your limitations, or at least know the bounds of good taste. Now where are me slippers. I need a liedown.





*that said, the thread hereabouts concerning what bones have you broken? Well my reply partially concerned the result of tumbling from a tree. Was fishing at the time and a goodly way from my car, so walking a mile with a busted rib was fun.