An 85th Birthday

Today is my 85th birthday. I slept in a bit later than usual, was still in bed when the 8 am news came on my bedside radio, soon rudely interrupted by an appalling racket of power drills in the next door apartment where renovations are taking place. Then the phone rang, and at the other end was brother Peter, phoning from Adelaide. He sounded pretty spry and brought me up to date with family news. My email too when I switched it on after breakfast, was replete with birthday greetings, including Peter's and a lovely note from Dodie Ziemer in Melbourne. I really do feel 85, still mobile, 20/20 vision thanks to successful cataract surgery and no major life-endangering diseases, but a handful or more of irritating relatively minor impairments that collectively remind me I am no longer young. I can't walk as briskly as once I could but at least I can walk, which is more than some my age can do. My reward for paying dues for half a century is honorary life member of the British Medical Association, so I get the BMJ every week; it's the only medical journal I read now. although I skim half a dozen others and occasionally read something in one of them. For the past few years it seems that hardly a week goes by without the obituary of a former friend or acquaintance in the UK; altogether I worked there for almost 10 years and one way or another, I had a large network of professional colleagues and personal friends, far more than I've acquired on this side of the pond. I remember several old people including my father, saying that old age gets lonely as friends and contemporaries die, in his case leaving him the sole survivor of a once large circle. I feel a bit like that sometimes, although as a lifelong 'loner' I may be less troubled by this than many other people. I have my books and the radio, and occasionally look at something other than news and weather reports on TV. David is laid low by a respiratory infection that has incapacitated many of the staff and cadets at RMC, but today I had lunch with Rebecca, Richard and Jonathan, to celebrate this milestone. I miss Wendy's little doggerel verse that used to be a consistent birthday ritual; once at least it was a real poem, preserved forever in print in the book of her Selected Works, and I still have many cards with other, briefer verses. I miss Wendy, and wish we were together. Even now, more than 10 months after her death, the wound is still raw, as I discovered when I had this thought about her yearly birthday verses and the sad realization that there will be no more of these cheery verses.