Tempus Fugit

In four months from today, all being well I will be in receipt of my state pension. It doesn't seem five minutes since I was a fresh-faced youth sitting in the QM Clerk's office at Albemarle Barracks wondering what I was supposed to be doing. It is in fact 47 years and a lot of water has flowed under any number of bridges since those days.

I'm not sure why I find myself reminiscing, if that's the right word, about my callow youthfulness and the different person I like to think I am now from who I was then. Things happen in life, good and bad which make us who we are and I hope that I'm now a better person than I was in my 20s and 30s when I drank and smoked too much and wasn't a particularly useful member of society.

That's my impression of those years between 1979 and 1997 most of which passed in a haze of beer and tobacco fumes. I might be wrong and I may have been a pillar of society and a boon to all those who knew me. I don't know because as Burns wrote “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion.”

We never really know how people think of us, and it's probably a good thing since it would be terribly disheartening to be able to read minds and get the unvarnished truth of how the way we present ourselves in actually received.

I seem to have drifted away from the point I was trying to make, which is that when the little bit of extra money arrives it will be pleasant and I hope it will mean that I can lead a slightly more sociable life than I have in recent times.

To close, I will come to the point and say, if anyone would like to provide me with some additional income until October comes around please feel free to visit:

https://onlyfans.com/heddonlad where I'm posting my poems, limericks, and haikus which you can enjoy for a small payment.

Peace and love xx