Warning: may contain politics
Sorry it’s been such a long, long time but let’s hope I can do better than I have done in the first half of the year.
It has been an odd six months during which I marked my 74th birthday.
I know it’s not a landmark birthday (that’s next year at 75) but it certainly seemed very different to previous years.
As a child birthdays mean cards, gifts, cake and jelly.
Your first birthday is a real milestone, but you rarely remember it. My fifth birthday was marked in Chesham but just a few weeks after that we moved lock, stock and barrel to Rhyl in North Wales.
This was the first real landmark year for me.
I look back on it now and realise that in the land of my father I was in the land of my fathers. My father was born in Wrexham and his father in Wales, and his father before him and all of my direct paternal lineage goes back in Wales to the early 1700s, to Machynlleth in the west of of the land of dragons.
To get back to landmarks, however, and 10 is the next big one because it has two numbers and is the age when we took the 11+ examination to decide whether we went to the local grammar school or the secondary modern, as I have already revealed I made it to the grammar school.
After that the next landmark was 21, that was when you could marry without your parents’ permission, and vote in a local or general election. If the decision to change the age from 21 to 18 had been taken in 1967 instead of 1969 I would have celebrated my 18th as the landmark year at which I become a man. Instead I missed that date so had to stick to 21 as a celebration of getting the key of the door.
There are many major events you will remember for the rest of your life: buying your first home; getting married; losing a close relative; but at the moment I am concentrating on birthday landmarks.
After 21 (nowadays 18) we used to look on 40 as the next big date when you suddenly hit middle age (nowadays people count 30 as the first real “0” landmark but that was just another date to us.
I suppose 50 counts because it is the half century. Women used to celebrate 60 as a time to retire and take life easy (it was 65 for men), then again 70 sounds serious and after that you forget the “0” and make every five years a landmark.
Why, then, does 74 feel so threatening?
Do you know what? After telling you all about it I suddenly feel better.
What is more is that there were no politics, despite the warning.
Roll on next year.
Robin's Nest 