The morning after

As I looked down at the Dyson vacuum cleaner, I saw what looked like a flame flickering inside the transparent cylinder which is its ‘bag'. I stopped the cleaner and saw that what I had thought was a flame was in fact the number ‘60' - a shiny red number 60, which had been catching the light as it whirled around in the patented Dyson vortex. The previous night we had had a party, my birthday party. I say the previous night, but we finally turned in just after 3 in the morning when all of our 30 or so guests had left. It had been a very good party, but my wife had sprinkled small, shiny cut-outs of the number 60 all over the place, presumably to remind me of my advancing years. Perhaps she was being kind - obviously, as you get older, the memory begins to fail and so you need to be reminded of things. Either that or she was just crowing about the fact that she's 7 years younger than me.

A good many of the guests had already attained and passed this age and various of them said that they weren't able to do what they used to do. They asked me if I felt my age and I had to say no, because I am still not aware of being limited in my activities. Now this is not because of any great miracle of rejuvenation in my life. It is because, at least from a sporting point of view, I have never been very active. The Gym was never my favourite place. This means that when others have noticed the start of a physical decline, I haven't, as I have nothing to judge it by. I have never gone in for marathons or weight - lifting and so I am not now regretting that I cannot run as fast as I once could or that I am unable to bench press 100 kilos. Neither do I have to watch my golf handicap inexorably rise.

That though leaves the question of my mental capacity. There, I am encouraged by various reports over the years, mentioned again in the Times the other day. Perhaps put from a somewhat partial point of view, the article said that those who read the Times or did crosswords had a significantly reduced risk of suffering from dementia as they got older. I don't know about Guardian readers, but obviously my years of reading the right paper are likely to stand me in good stead. Of course, what the research actually shows is that keeping your brain active delays the onset of deterioration or, more accurately, the symptoms of deterioration. It was found some years ago that some of the people who engage in significant mental activity and who are apparently perfectly well, actually have the same amount of damage to the brain as those displaying the symptoms of dementia. It seems, however, that their regular mental gymnastics somehow enable these people to avoid the consequences of that physical damage, to work around the malfunctioning neurons. A true example of ‘Use it or lose it'.

So then after all of these years, granted the inherent dangers of sport and its tendency to do nasty things to your joints and tendons, I can justify the slothful attitude I have taken to life and continue to limit my exercise to a reasonable amount of walking to keep my heart in order and perhaps a few hours gentle skiing now and then, purely to enjoy the scenery. Indeed it would be a form of masochism to start doing anything more, as I would immediately become aware, like my friends, of my limitations - sport would actually make me feel old. By contrast, mental exercise is not only something which I enjoy, but it seems that it is likely to give me major benefits for the remainder of my life.

I never did like the rather sadistic nature of the sports teachers I encountered anyway, with their blind, unthinking devotion to the idea that sport was good for you and more sport (preferably in the cold and wet) was better still, or the Californian mantra of ‘No pain, no gain'. Now it is clear that I was right all along to decide that sport and I would never be best friends.

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