For the last thirty or so years, I have helped to run a roving cricket team.
In exactly 400 matches of the club’s history, of which I have played in 327, I have scored 3980 runs, taken 381 catches and 170 or so wickets, all of which would look a lot more impressive if they are not divided by the 33 years we’ve been going, or the 260 or so times that I have got out. But that’s not really the point; the point is that I am still hopelessly and irreparably in love with numbers. That little lot all came out of a private spreadsheet that I have nerdishly kept ever since Mr. Excel ilaunched his spreadsheet on September 30th1985.
So it is a delight for me that a grateful nation and its stakeholders has not let my recent statistical milestone of 60 years pass unobserved. So who has noticed?
Well, the MOD have for a start, bless them, after a few reminders. All those cold nights in trenches on Salisbury Plain, those sweaty days on look-out posts on the Hong Kong/China border, those patrols on the beleaguered streets of the Ardoyne; all that leaping from crevasse to crevasse in South Georgia, mopping my brow in a Belize rain-forest and strutting in front of Buckingham Palace in my dark green smart stuff. Everything is now rewarded. I have been notified in today’s post that I will trouser a small ‘gratuity’ to take Mrs. M-G somewhere nice, and a small, regular amount that will keep us in Jaffa Cakes forever. Thank you. You, the tax payer, have simply been too kind.
Next up is a note from the West Sussex Hospital Trust, also in today’s post, ‘inviting’ me (I love that word) to go and be screened for colon cancer at my convenience. I think that they meant ‘in’ my convenience, as these days the heavy lifting for the test is done at home, presumably in one of the smaller rooms. Both my parents succumbed to this disease as a result of being diagnosed too late, so I fully intend to accept the invitation swiftly and whole-heartedly.
Further down, in the same post, is a letter from Specsavers, reminding me that I am massively overdue an eye test. I am, but I’m also relatively happy at the moment with my slightly grubby stock of glasses, and the importance of a new test never quite rises high enough in the in-tray. Besides, I always nearly faint when they try out that air-blowing thing which I think is to see if you’re suitable to be out in high winds.
From Network Rail comes news of the progress on my senior rail card. Obviously the 30% off most fares is a wonderful gift and an incentive to travel very slowly in an environmentally friendly way, but it is being called ‘senior’ that has so touched me. I have been called many things in my life, but ‘senior’ isn’t one of them. I never made it to prefect in any of my three schools, for reasons I now understand and support. I left the army as a captain which can’t really be called senior, as it has eight ranks above it, if you count Field Marshall. I ran a company, granted, but it was a small company where we all did everything, and you can’t be all that senior if you are called upon to mend the cistern in the lady’s loo. So being senior on the rails, rather than junior off them, is a prize beyond rubies.
But the clincher to my wonderful day came not in the post, but in a recurring advertisement on my Facebook feed, to the effect that for the small consideration of £19.25 per month, Dignity Funerals will be in ‘personal and regular contact to provide advice and guidance on all aspects of arranging my funeral’. From £24.51 a month, I can be part of the Diamond Plan, which I have a feeling gives you a cathedral service when the time comes, so I think I’m going for that one.
Dignity also contacted me on my 50thand 55thbirthdays, so I can understand the slight undertone of impatience in their latest ads. I suspect it might all get a bit shrill at 65 and 70, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, this seventh decade lark is suiting me down to the ground.
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