Fifty-four…

Another Birthday, my fifty-fourth.

Fifty-four winters and fifty-four summers, how can that be? It only seems like yesterday when I was a cowboy shooting the injuns with my Lone Ranger six-gun. Whooooosh! There goes my life rushing by.

Hard to believe that almost a third of my life has passed, well maybe a little more than a third, but life expectancies are getting longer. Anyone in their teens today has a very good chance of living well into their hundreds and there is a growing scientific opinion that some soon to be born, perhaps born already, may never need to die at all. Science and technology are moving so fast.

The oldest recorded living human was Jeanne Clement who died in 1997 aged one hundred and twenty-two years, not a bad innings as my dad would say. I’m not sure that she played cricket to the last though. Some creatures live even longer than Jeanne. There’s an Antarctic sponge that has been alive for over fifteen hundred years, koi carp can easily live to reach two hundred years, Adwaita, a giant tortoise, died in 2006 aged two hundred and fifty-five, there was a Lobster caught off the coast of Maine who had been in the water for one hundred and forty years, even those horrible, hairy tarantula’s live to be over a hundred. Brrrrrrrr, nasty creepy crawly blighters.

Whooooosh! There it goes again

What if we could live forever like the Hydra, growing to mature adult than back to polyp over and over in a never ending repeated cycle that has the potential of eternity. What if we knew their secret?

Today has been a day of meandering and wandering, a good day on the whole, enjoyable in a laid back kind of way. It started with a guilty half hours read in bed before getting up, there was a MacDonald’s double cheeseburger lunch, some fun presents and then a little Italian we know for dinner.

And all the messages and mails, phone calls and cards. Happy birthday boss - and I haven't been their boss for years.

Time’s passing. That’s okay. I’m not sure I want to be downloaded onto a computer, or clone a replacement me ready for this body’s death. If they ever discover the secret of the Hydra I don’t think it’s for me – all that growing up then growing down again.

No, I quite like the sound that my life makes as it rushes along.

Whooooosh! There it goes again.