Skip to main content

You’re only as old as the survey you take

This is my 200th column for this paper. According to a survey I took this week, I’m unlikely to reach 201...

Sat at my desk in the office at lunchtime recently, I saw a Tweet from the BBC with a link asking me “How does your lifestyle affect the age of your body?” and a link to an online test to help me discover the age of mine.

I know the age of my body. I have a birth certificate to prove it. Still, I’d been out for a brisk 6 mile walk just days before, and was consuming my healthy lunchtime salad, followed by an apple and some fromage frais.

So I felt comfortable that I’d get a result suggesting that my body, if not quite a temple, was at least a well-preserved place of interest, and definitely not a condemned building with severe structural problems.

Ten minutes of clicking later, I was in for a nasty surprise. It seems the bulldozers of doom will be here to demolish my dangerous abode at any moment. I’ve not even been cluttering up the planet for half a century yet, and the test reckons I have a body that’s the equivalent of 72.

72! On that basis, I might not even make it to the end of this column – I’m only half way through, and time appears to be desperately short. I may never get to swim with dolphins, become a Formula 1 driver or write that book I’ve been annoying friends and family about. Or even make it to dinner.

In fact, the additional stress induced by this shocking revelation may even now be pushing that age up even higher, in an escalating feedback loop of doom which will see me riding the celestial stair-lift to meet my maker before I finish typing this sentence.

Phew. Made it. Anyway, the test (which you can find at http://bbc.in/1QxJQFV) clearly highlighted the effect that having previously smoked for a couple of decades has had on me. Unfortunately, tweaking things that I can still do something about looks daunting.

Even if I immediately get a large pet, somehow avoid getting stressed, exercise every day, stop drinking, become an optimist, get my five a day every day, give up processed, salty, sugary and fatty foods, get lots of support from those around me and regularly fast, the very best I can do is come in at mid 40s.

Bearing in mind that stressing and being pessimistic are my reason for reluctantly getting out of bed in the morning, and even with a noticeable improvement on all other fronts (I’m still not getting an elephant), it’s likely I can manage mid 50s if I’m really determined, motivated, and commit to it.

Determination, motivation and commitment being three more things I’m routinely hopeless at.

So, goodbye cruel world. I’m off to sulk over a large bag of chips.

Hang on, can I retire now, then? Things are looking up.

This post (hopefully!) appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 15th of April 2016. I haven't got my copy in the post yet, and their Opinion website page still has my F1 season preview as the most recent piece.

Should everything have gone according to plan, this would indeed be my 200th published column (there was one they reckoned was libellous, which didn't get published), so quite a milestone for me. With a few Christmas/New Year/Exam results/Holiday gaps, that also means I'm just a couple of weeks away from 4 years, too. Cripes.

I really was expecting to get a result from this test that said I was around my actual age, physically. 72 was a nasty surprise, especially as I eat pretty well, do some exercise and hardly drink, plus quit smoking 7 years ago. Having said that, I do feel rougher than a bear's bum most days, so I guess it's pretty accurate. Dammit.  

(CD A-Z: Still on E - musically, not the 90s happy pills - with Enigma's "Love Sensuality Devotion" Remix outing from... oh, look... 1991.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...