Welcome Time Travellers

One of my more cryptic post titles I think.

I noticed today that I was getting several 'hits' from first time visitors and most were coming to me via the same URL which by it's own definition, has to do with the passing of time and growing old.

Now I'm not sure yet if they mean they deal with blogs written BY oldies or ones that oldies might like to read but in any case, my little old blog has been given a recommendation and I'm very happy about that.

In fact I'd take both hands off my walker and leap in the air if I had the one and could do the other.

So welcome to you all. Please read a few posts to get a feel for the things I write about and don't just read one post - in case I've had an off day and it's basically crap. Enter the dark recesses of the archive section and see what you find. I do. Quite often in fact. I have so many "senior moments" that I can reread my posts a week later like someone else wrote them !!

Well seeing as I've created this post, I may as well fill it up with something. It's like in sepia days when I used to write proper letters.....you remember, on paper. I always felt the need to fill up a page even if I'd little to say. Same with my "Page-a-Day" diary. I remember I started one in 1970 as it was going to be my last year at boarding school and then I'd be going off to college and so I just knew I'd have loads of stuff to write about.

Well up until the middle of June when I DID leave school, my writing was huge as I'd a page to fill and nothing to talk about. You can only mention getting up, the weather, getting bullied, classes, after school activities, getting bullied again and going to bed so many times. Even writing about what the priests and nuns got up to when they didn't know we were watching them became dull and boring to write about. Well except for that day the bishop came to visit and he joined in.

My but that was a page that just wrote itself !!

But it's funny to read the diary now, 38 years later, and see how the size of the writing altered dramatically the day after I left school and flew across to London. I was 17 and it was my first ever flight; my first time outside Ireland; my first trip on my own. I'd no idea where I was going after the plane landed. I'd not arranged a place to stay. I had only the hazy promise of a summer job.

But I was 17.

In the space of that first day I flew into Heathrow, got a bus (I'd once been on a coach but never a bus), walked around Isleworth for hours, finally got a place to stay and to celebrate, took a tube ride into the heart of London. Within a few hours I was propositioned twice by 'nice' men who asked me to go with them back to their flats (what a friendly place London was in 1970 !!) and, as it was General Election night, I mingled with thousands of people in Trafalgar Square where ITV and BBC had erected huge TV screens so everyone could follow the results and still be outside.

Can you IMAGINE trying to get that lot into one diary page ?? I was half way down, using a font that could only be read using an electron microscope and I'd only described the plane flight.

That first day spilled over onto 3 pages and I never did catch up as the next few days were just as memorable. After that I lost interest and a few days per week were left empty......then only a few days a month were completed and finally, around October time, the diary contains empty page after empty page like some sort of literary Marie Celeste. I'll now never know what I did at the end of that year.

That might be a good thing.

Given that it was all 38 years ago, I guess time HAS gone by for me. A butt load of it. And so I welcome elderly visitors to my elderly blog. But be warned. I feel 35. Hell I feel 25. The body might be a bit past it and can only manage 3 games of golf a week but the mind is like a steel trap.

Ok a mind like a slightly rusty steel trap. Time hasn't been kind to it.