Life ends at 45

   Okay so now we've been told. Its official. And I have a sneaking suspicion only people over 45 read my blog. According to the latest News your brain cells are dying earlier than we thought and if the word 'retirement' isn't enough to make any 65 year old feel on the crap heap, being told you are brain dead after 45 is going to really do the trick.

   Well let me tell you I have hardly started living yet and I'm a good few years over 45. I haven't even been married let lone divorced three times and I haven't reached the pinnacle of my creative work yet so there's still a lot to pack in. I did the online mental agility test included in the news item and wondered whether it was an error and intended for twelve year olds. I play at least one game of chess every day and am more in touch with the news than ever before, using an iPad as a very handy device to gather information. I also play and compose music at least twice a week. 

   Although I was deemed "thick" at school in the days when getting into university was actually very difficult I reckon I would leave many young graduates standing if brain/reasoning power was tested today and not least in stamina as my current video project am working roughly fourteen hours a day.

  So, please forgive the lack of modesty here but spurred by increasing irritation that generalisations, frequently contradictory are thrust upon us.  I refuse to succumb to being a victim of Ageism. My uncle who was my guardian in his fifties, when I was seventeen, was a highly capable and distinguished man, being the chairman of the largest Timber Sawmills in Scotland and the Dean of Guild of Glasgow, said to me that a man reaches his prime in his late fifties. Today we are told that the new twenty is the old thirty, that the new forty is the old sixty so this is another piece of unconnected 'official' thinking.

   Whereas I am supposed to be well into an era of 'managed decline' I would prefer to say I am in an era of 'managed time' - with luck another thirty years of active service. One of my heros and someone I once met is the broadcaster John Humphries and who out-speeds and outwits our youthful politicians.