Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

You know that you're getting old when...

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    #51
    Surely you only need a monocle...

    Comment


      #52
      Originally posted by Gangster Octopus View Post
      My beard's been white for over a decade...
      The silver in my beard is the only reason I've started shaving as frequently (every other day) as I do. I don't mind being old; I mind looking it.

      Comment


        #53
        White hairs in the nose and ears

        Comment


          #54
          Have had a patch of silver on my beard since 21. It's the ear hair, nose hair and the gammy hip that's getting me down.

          Comment


            #55
            Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
            20 and 30 year anniversaries of things you remember really well.

            In a slightly different vein, I found out Maureen Lipman's "ology" BT adverts first aired 30 years ago.

            Teenagers born this century.

            Seeing your favourite band, who are all in their 60s now.
            Anniversary arithmetic is a growing problem, not helped by the change in century. It was easy to grasp in the 1990's that some date was 50 years since D-Day or Indian Partition, but now when somebody on the radio says "And we're going back 20 years ..." I don't expect them to talk about Blair or Hong Kong or Monica Lewinsky. I need to check on my fingers before I believe them.

            Comment


              #56
              Originally posted by WOM View Post
              I currently ride in wearing cherry Docs that are, indeed, older than many people I work with.
              Older, but definitely cooler.

              Comment


                #57
                Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                I get worried every time I have a cognitive fail, such as forgetting where I parked the car or took off my shoes, but I reassure myself that I was having such fails in my twenties so what's new?
                You're right, but it'll get worse believe me. My son notices and worries about it more than I. For me it's just annoying to walk into a room and forget why I'm there. I was never great at multi-tasking either, but now it's non-existent. For example every night i take two glasses of water into the bedroom. Once it would've entailed a single trip, now it takes two — one for each glass. There are scores of similar instances everyday.

                Comment


                  #58
                  True enough. I'm always finding cups of cold coffee around the house I forgot I had made, and sometimes I will leave the car unlocked on the drive all night, even once with the keys in the ignition and once with the driver's door left open.

                  Leaving cash in the ATM dispenser is another one (take card but forget cash) but fortunately only once a year or so.

                  Comment


                    #59
                    I certainly done the latter a couple of times in the past few months.

                    I will leave the car unlocked on the drive all night, even once with the keys in the ignition and once with the driver's door left open.

                    I once left the car running while we went to watch a movie. It was parked, unlocked, on a meter on one of the busiest streets in downtown Vancouver. Amazingly it was still there when we returned. The engine was a little warm but otherwise everything was fine. It happened when I was in my early 30s though, so nothing at all to do with aging.

                    Comment


                      #60
                      It all depends how forgetful you were in the first place, doesn't it? If you've always been a bit naturally absent-minded, it's bound to get far worse from 50 or 60 onwards. I've always been a pretty forgetful person and I can vouch for the fact that it doesn't get any better with age, but it doesn't worry me as I've always been like that, I don't particularly attribute it to the ageing process. I am the sort of person who is not always sure which car park he's parked his car in a large city, so never mind where in the car park.

                      When I lived in Dubai in the early 1990's, with the extreme heat my mind would go a bit doolally at times, a bit as if I'd had permanent mirage-like experiences in the desert, when you start hallucinating and see funny things floating and shimmering in the air. My natural forgetfulness was maxed out to the hilt over there (and I was only about 27), so much so that one day early on in my stay there, after a shopping trip in one of those Dubai insanely humongous shopping centres, I just couldn't find my car, I really couldn't, I looked everywhere roughly where I thought it was and still bloody couldn't. A very nice Qatari (a tourist) helped me for a good while - I was a right sorry sight in that car park frantically looking for my car almost shouting its name like when you look for your dog in a field or the dunes, he really must have thought I was one hell of a thick Westerner and probably subconsciously took pity on me, I mean he even ended up inviting me to his house in Doha! - and, while his poor wife and young kids were waiting in his own car in the searing heat, he did his best to help me for maybe 30 minutes but to no avail at all. Crikey, I really felt sorry for him and his poor family for a while, I really did. Eventually, after the best part of 2 hours, with a coffee break in the middle, I gave up my preposterous search, knackered and confused (it was particularly hot that day, it was in September, so something like 45C/115F) and I had no alternative but to take a taxi home. I'll never forget the humiliating expression on my friend's face (an old Dubai hand) that night in the hotel bar when I fessed up that "I had been unable to locate the car park where I had parked my car and therefore had to take a taxi home".

                      I went back the day after and located my car in a nearby -but utterly different- shopping centre. I sort of figured out later that it was linked to the other shopping centre via a connection system, something that I stupidly overlooked but more importantly overshot. But that's speculation as I still don't know to this day what the hell happened there and I will never know. I just rest easy in the knowledge that my brain cannot cope with a particular set of new experiences at a certain temperature.
                      Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 11-08-2017, 03:05. Reason: Wrong sort of heat on the line

                      Comment


                        #61
                        It all depends how forgetful you were in the first place, doesn't it? If you've always been a bit naturally absent-minded, it's bound to get far worse from 50 or 60 onwards.

                        That's right. I think it's important too to emphasise that it has nothing to do with incipient dementia. My mother, and her three sisters, suffered with that in the their later years but she was not at all absent-minded until the disease kicked in her early 80s.

                        Comment


                          #62
                          Kev, you sound like Detritus from the Discworld books.

                          Comment


                            #63
                            Originally posted by Gerontophile View Post
                            Kev, you sound like Detritus from the Discworld books.
                            Never heard of your lovely-sounding Detritus character, so checked him out. Yup, just like him, I'm not a big fan of heat (am a bigger fan of fans) but I've coped well in other very hot climates, albeit for much shorter periods. The main problem in Dubai for me was more to do with the sudden and brutal temperature difference between anything inside (cold, because of everything being air-conditioned) and outside (extremely hot most of the year), my brain didn't always adapt well to the constant thermal shocks. I must have mini-pranged my car half a dozen times there (my last one, a great Mustang convertible, was written off just before I left Dubai - not my fault I hasten to add and it went to court, I won but lost about 2 grand -, the general standard of driving was truly horrendous, you kind of prayed before every big roundabout or big junction), I set fire to somebody's flat by accident etc.

                            But in truth, what did my brain in far more was that I never took to the place even though I had a very nice lifestyle there (great flat, great cars, great salary package, permanent use of a speed boat via a friend of mine, great driving holidays in nearby Oman etc.)... The intense isolation and disturbing feeling of alienation (no Internet in those days, no radio, no TV apart from CNN, few newspapers etc.), the crippling loneliness at times, the boozy expat community, the rampant and ludicrous consumerism (cheek by jowl with abject poverty), I felt a bit like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, the place gave you the impression to be a character in a J.G. Ballard novel chock-full of "mega shopping malls", concrete monstrosities and motorway flyovers. I missed greenery, rolling hills, the rain, the seasons, ordinariness, normal people, normal pubs, football, pretty urbanscape, architecture, art, music, concerts etc. - in a word, I missed everything. I cut my contract short after 2 years, had seen enough.
                            Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 11-08-2017, 04:18.

                            Comment


                              #64
                              Gout. I'm currently in the middle of my second attack of it. Apart from sounding like the kind of disease that only affects retired majors from the Raj, it also renders me almost immobile (and as this week I am training a group of people in Prague, immobility is not an option).

                              I would not wish gout on my worst enemy by the way. It must be the worst pain that the male human can endure.

                              Plus when you read about the ways to tackle it one of the main approaches is to "cut down on red meat". I've been a vegetarian for 32years.

                              I am going on about this I realise but it's sort of hard to think about anything else.

                              Comment


                                #65
                                A little while back we were watching Pointless when I made reference to a contestant as "that old guy". My son pointed out that said "old guy" was probably younger than me. I looked again; he probably was.

                                Recently I also looked at some photos of my father from 1974. He was the same age I am now, 51, but looked so much older. Plus, he probably was much more of an adult than I am. Him having fought in WW2 possibly makes some difference in that regard.

                                Comment


                                  #66
                                  I've got a friend who suffers from gout and he's a very sober individual. Doesn't even drink tea or coffee.

                                  Comment


                                    #67
                                    Wine is the trigger for mine - alcohol in general sets off a small amount of reddening / heating up in my knees. I've never eaten a lot of red meat, the cause is probably not drinking enough water. Six cups of tea a day don't count, apparently.

                                    Comment


                                      #68
                                      Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                                      Gout. I'm currently in the middle of my second attack of it. Apart from sounding like the kind of disease that only affects retired majors from the Raj, it also renders me almost immobile (and as this week I am training a group of people in Prague, immobility is not an option).

                                      I would not wish gout on my worst enemy by the way. It must be the worst pain that the male human can endure.

                                      Plus when you read about the ways to tackle it one of the main approaches is to "cut down on red meat". I've been a vegetarian for 32years.

                                      I am going on about this I realise but it's sort of hard to think about anything else.
                                      I completely feel your pain, mate. I get an attack every few years. but this year between January and May I had 4 attacks, 2 in each foot. I couldn't wear a proper shoe for weeks. It got so bad I actually ended up at a foot specialist having an injection of cortisone in between the joint of my big toe.
                                      (And then just as I finally FINALLY got through it I got a massive verucca on the ball of my foot which needed 5 treatments of liquid nitrogen and silver nitrate, which is torturous in itself. I can finally walk without pain this week for the first time since about a week or two in March.)

                                      I try to keep some Naproxen or Diclofenac around so that at the first sign of an attack, I can bang a couple, drink a load of milk (dairy reduces your uric acid levels) and hopefully head it off at the pass. There's no point waiting for a doctor - if you don't catch it in the first couple of hours, you're generally fucked.
                                      This is harder these days as you can't buy either over the counter any more. (Naproxen in the form of Feminax Ultra was pulled recently.)
                                      However I did find an online pharmacy who surprisingly were happy to sell me 112 x full strength Naproxen on the basis of me saying it was in case of gout. The online doctor must have had it himself.
                                      It's genetic though. And red meat isn't nearly as bad for setting it off as beer is. Any alcohol really, but beers the worst.
                                      Also asparagus is a total nightmare for setting it off too.
                                      The Gout society has some info about food here. But really it's drink less booze, drink more water and keep some Naproxen handy.

                                      Or go to the doctor and end up taking allopurinol for the rest of you life.
                                      Last edited by hobbes; 11-08-2017, 09:16.

                                      Comment


                                        #69
                                        I've got a friend who suffers from gout and he's a very sober individual. Doesn't even drink tea or coffee.
                                        Should drink coffee. Apparently it's quite good for reducing uric acid levels. (I don't, obviously. Coffee is foul.)

                                        Comment


                                          #70
                                          Originally posted by hobbes View Post
                                          Should drink coffee. Apparently it's quite good for reducing uric acid levels. (I don't, obviously. Coffee is foul.)
                                          Cherry Extract tablets.

                                          (Doesn't treat it, but is supposed to stave it off)

                                          Comment


                                            #71
                                            Possibly.

                                            Better evidence here.

                                            Comment


                                              #72
                                              Thanks all. I'm off to the chemist to see about naproxen and it's availability over the counter in Czechia. Otherwise, I'll just chug ibuprofen.


                                              Originally posted by hobbes View Post
                                              And red meat isn't nearly as bad for setting it off as beer is. Any alcohol really, but beers the worst.
                                              Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                                              this week I am training a group of people in Prague
                                              Hmmmm. Yes.

                                              Comment


                                                #73
                                                Just one thing to bear in mind. Do see a doctor at some point about Naproxen and/or Diclofenac (which works a bit better.)
                                                The reason they were taken off sale in the UK is there is some evidence of an elevated risk of heart problems when you take them.
                                                I've never had a problem getting them prescribed by doctors and I'm a much bigger heart risk than you I suspect, but it's worth mentioning.

                                                It looks like they might sell Diclofenac over the counter, at least.
                                                Last edited by hobbes; 11-08-2017, 11:08.

                                                Comment


                                                  #74
                                                  Managed to get naproxen - "Nalgesin" is the brand - at lunch time. Hope this helps somewhat.

                                                  Comment


                                                    #75
                                                    What's the dose?
                                                    It'll take 3 or 4 hours to really settle in. And it's sort of cumulative. So one dose every 12 hours-ish should help.

                                                    Comment

                                                    Working...
                                                    X