Feeling old

I thought that the aches and pains I am increasingly discovering would be the thing that would make me feel old, but that was before I spent a day at home last week due to the snow. I did try to go to work, but when I saw the 4x4 in front of me skid, I decided that the world of internet marketing could survive without me for a day. Moreover, I decided that if I was going to die in the snow, I would want to be doing something a damn sight more worthwhile than going in to work just so that I could show my face and make it onto the leaderboard of 'people who respond to intimidation by risking their lives to get into the office'. However, when I got home, a mere hour and a half after leaving, the Boy Wonder was slightly underwhelmed, and responded not with wild elation that I had survived the peril of the snow and had also come home for an extra day of fun with him, but with a slightly deflated 'Oh - well I've got lots of jobs to do today'. Fair enough I suppose - I do rib him a little about his part-time status and sometimes his level of achievement on his self-employed days, but I remember when I used to have time on my own in the house to do all my jobs when he was at evening rehearsals, time which was suddenly snatched away from me when he started rehearsing in the day, and wondered whether I have made a grave mistake. Instead of offering to share those jobs, which are incidentally not just my jobs so much as household chores that the Boy Wonder is mostly unware of, I just moved them around so that I get them done in stages rather than a blitz one night a week. Ok, if I'm honest, some of them don't get done that much any more at all, but it goes to show how little you really need to achieve if you want to get away with the bare minimum. So, he got on with doing something incomprehensible with solder which will apparently revolutionise the studio in the spare room upstairs by requiring much shorter lengths of cable. I mustered up as much enthusiasm as I could, and it still wasn't enough to see any way in which this development would benefit my life, but inspired by his sudden enthusiasm for achieving things, and feeling as though I'd better pull something pretty good out of the bag in order not to be the lazy couch-potato on the sofa watching day-time TV while the Boy Wonder was in a creative world of success, I hit upon the most tragic brainwave I have ever had. Instead of getting the wellies back on and braving another dice with death in the beautifully snowy, but ultimately pretty shooty woods in the village, I hit on a desperately well-conceived plan to defrost the freezer, making full use of the snow to maintain the temperature of its contents whilst I fought with the sheets of ice which build up when the Boy Wonder absent-mindedly leaves the freezer door open overnight. I unpacked the food into carrier bags, plonked them in the snow, covered them with a bin bag to stop the new snow getting in, and then spent a happy couple of hours making ratatouille in between bouts of kettle boiling, floor mopping and finger shredding for the cause. It was a wildly successful venture and one which left me with a pleasant sense of multi-tasked achievement. However, there was a moment of sadness when I realised what had happened - instead of flinging myself into the white stuff for snow angel creation and snowman construction, I was excited about the idea of being able to defrost the freezer without ruining the food. I don't know when this shift towards adulthood came about, or even whether I would have noticed it had it not suddenly snowed, but I think it might be a step towards my apparently inevitable maturity. Having said that, as a child I remember having to spend a snow day when the school was closed ringing parents of the children who had not made it in to let them know the school would be closed the next day too, so maybe it's my Mum's fault for teaching at my primary school - it sucked the fun out of the rarest of treats, the school closure, and left me with a distinctly unhealthy approach towards the practical applications of snow.