Junction 36

Feeling my age on Humpty Dumpty Hill, Burton in Kendal

So I had one of those milestone birthdays recently. I suppose I’d been fearing its onset pretty much since the last one, and it didn’t disappoint. There’s something disturbing about the number 50 and its existential half-way baggage. Half-way to what…..paradise?! So near, yet so far away, as Billy Fury beautifully crooned.

Those folk who blast on cheerfully, without regrets, exclaiming that age is just a number, you have to admire them, don’t you? The alternative – a good slap about the chops – no longer feels seemly at my age. I suspect, personally speaking, the crisis of ageing is exacerbated by having a teenage brain trapped inside an increasingly decrepit carcass. Like an emperor dragonfly unable to escape its cocoon.

Steptoe and son, BBC – funny gif, hope it works

Speaking of half-way, I suppose I ought to be at least that far through some sort of aspirational portfolio of milestone escapades by now. You know those bucket list-ticking types, more power to them, who simply have to climb Everest, visit Disneyland, scuba-dive the Barrier Reef, sky-dive from from a hot-air balloon and have a threesome with Kylie Minogue and the Pope? No? Hmmnn. Having scaled Ben Nevis and Scafell Pike, I had a passing notion to stomp up Snowden on a recent visit to Wales. Then a friend showed me the picture below.

Snowden, North Wales Live

Instead, I had a leisurely amble up lowly Mynydd Nefyn with a clutch of the most beautiful souls I know. For if plodding around this place for fifty years has taught me anything, it’s to spend as much time as possible doing the things you love best with the people who mean most. I’ll get my coat…..

Jessie, Mynydd Nefyn