Now what?

Well, the first working week of the year is done, and it wasn't that bad.  Unfortunately, this has led me into a false sense of security.  I thought I'd broken the back of the new year.  I was rudely disabused of this belief on Monday morning when I work up with a monumental gob on.

It's not even as though I've got much to bellyache about at present.  Work's ticking over; we've got some holidays booked and looming, and all is well.  However, it's the prospect of another year exactly like the last that's getting in amongst me.

That's the real catalyst of mid-life crises I think.  It's not grandiose, nihilistic notions of one's mortality; it's the realisation that all the great changes that happen to a rotter over the course of his allotted years are now very probably behind you.  It's going to be like this until...well, until it is no longer like this, if you know what I mean.  That's a sobering thought, eh?

Also, there doesn't appear to be any easy way out of the malaise.  On Saturday, I had an inkling there might be a fug on the horizon, so I thought I'd take myself off to London's fashionable west end and piss some money up the wall on unnecessary consumer durables.  But when I got there, I realised I couldn't be bothered with them.  Most men my age still get a minor frisson from buying toys, but I no longer do.  I've never been very materialistic I suppose.

I could take up a dangerous hobby - martial darts for example.  But it sounds like an awful lot of effort.  I'm not sure I could be bothered.

Welcome back...right, tea break's over - back on your heads.

The first working day of the new year for yours truly.  It's not been that bad to be honest.  I think my absence of festive sentiment this yuletide saved me.  It wasn't much of a wrench to get back to it.  The worst part was the alarm doing its pieces at 7.20 this morning, which felt like the middle of the night to me.  Other than that, I found my trotters in no time.

It helped also that Missus O has booked loads of mini-breaks for the upcoming months.  I had a list of leave to get in the diary at work when I arrived, which was a pleasure unalloyed.  There's a part of one that weeps a little at divvying the year up like this; it's a bit like wishing one's life away.  But, let's not delude ourselves, friends, everyone dislikes his or her job to some extent.  Those who pretend they don't are joyless, friendless fcuking weirdos.  For me work's a mild irritant.  But in the past I've had jobs that I would happily have seen mown down by a runaway steam engine.  So when the opportunity to not have to attend to my miserable duties for a day or two arises, I cling to it like a starving man to a Wagon Wheel.

I wonder if I've crossed an Xmas Rubicon?  Even the removal of the decorations didn't garner a flicker of regret this year.  I've grown immune, it seems.  It's only taken 46 years.  I do hope something takes its place in my affections though.  It'll be a boring dotage otherwise.  Life's just a little vanilla when you can't get ridiculously over-excited.  I suppose that the one great thing that adults lose when they jettison childish things - over-excitement.  That and laughing, I mean really laughing.  Being flaccid and helpless with mirth.  When's the last time that happened to you?  I thought as much.  Shame, really.  I used to love a laugh, me.