Horizon recently did an episode on Growing Old, different theories on why it happens, how it might be slowed or prevented. It wasn’t the most interesting Horizon episode I’ve seen, apart from suggesting that studies had proved, or strongly suggested, that antioxidants have little benefit to slowing the aging process, as many products and adverts proclaim. It inspired a few thoughts within me though, like how I want to have a white beard when I’m old. I’ll probably wear tweed too, so I look like some old professor, and maybe I’ll even be one.

When you’re young, you feel your youth will last forever, you can’t ever imagine being old and achey and not able to do things. When you’re young, summer holidays last forever, at the start at least, six weeks is forever. Often, I feel, people, unless it’s just me, can’t imagine feeling any different to how they feel at a certain time. If you’re in the depths of a dark depression, you can’t imagine ever feeling happy again. When you feel happy, you wonder whatever you were so down about. For a few days before Christmas I was ill, some sort of flu or a strong cold or something. It was only three, maybe four, days, but when I was lying in bed all congested and nauseous, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not feel like that. Now I’m in my final year of university, Childhood’s End, and yet the days and weeks and months, what’s left of them, stretch out before me and I can’t imagine them ever ending, that there will ever be anything other than the house I live in now, and the people I live with now, and the course I’m on now.

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I can barely believe it’s nearly three already. Still, I suppose I got up late. I read the second half of a short story by Angus Wilson earlier, which I was supposed to read and analyse by tomorrow. Well, I intended to get onto analysing it, but then I read another Raymond Carver story. It was one of his better ones, in my opinion, since some speak to me less than others. It was about a man who felt his life was falling about going to abandon his children’s dog because he hated it. Having read that, still procrastinating, I decided to reread William Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow. (more…)