Friday April 12th 2019

I have just realised that although this year long personal diary is littered with images, none of me in this celebration year. Until now. It came to me this morning as their is an image in the kitchen wall of my favorite view in Northumberland. It was taken in 2008, I have my back to the camera, and the view is before me. And I have dark hair.  Okay, a semi circle of dark hair, and very little grey. Tempest Fugit now dictates that the silverback persona is a reality. I sometimes look at myself and wonder who I am. Not in a psychotic paranoid way but in a way of failure to recognise myself. I feel exactly the same as I did in my teens and early 20's but now the reflection which stares back at me is a stranger. I'm not keeping pace with Wilde's fabled Dorian Gray novel. I don't mind getting older, it's just that it's really weird. My parents say this, that even though they're in their eighties, they feel inside like young adults. And I'm glad of that, both for them and for myself. I can vividly remember most of my childhood. Events, feelings, emotions, smells, emotional first stirrings of the natural world, and a feeling of unbridled freedom. 

I had a lot of freedom in my childhood, hours spent wandering the countryside, nowhere to be, no meetings to attend, no responsibilities. Just lazy days sometimes a whole day sitting under a tree, or beside a river, for absolutely no reason other than I could. In many ways, this year is about recreating this. Idle thought. Time for that childlike wonder of freedom and exploration to once again become my soul mate. Middle age I believe is a state of mind, settling into slippers and a steady life planning what to do when we retire is a recipe for growing old. View the world as a blank canvass, and the future seems a long, long way away, as it did fifty years ago when aged 5, my Birthdays took decades to arrive. I've long avoided any responsibility. Except to tread lightly on this life. That, and trying not to look back too much, but dream forwards. Failing that I might just sit under a tree for 6 hours and do absolutely nothing.