As I rapidly approach what feels like my six thousand and forty eighth birthday, I am aware I am even more rapidly approaching - nay, have overtaken and am currently speeding down the inside lane of - what is commonly known as Grumpy Old Fart Syndrome.

What worries (although worries is probably overstating it - slightly troubles? Mildly concerns?) me is how pleased I am about it.

Grumpy Old Fart Syndrome, or GOFS for convenience, seems to be the wine-soaked saving grace of the fact that the sand in the magical hourglass called life is muy rapido running in the non-optimal direction.

Remember when time used to stretch like an unbroken ribbon, shimmering with endless opportunities and excitement, a blaze of glory into the future? More prosaically, remember when the summer holidays were almost too long, and that last draggy week before school started was incredibly exciting because of all the new stationery, the smell of fresh pencils, and getting to help cover exercise books with brown paper and Contact?

Okay I’m showing my age, but that’s the point. Time has flown, and is flying, faster by the second. What is personally hardest to take is that the last twenty years have involved a fair wad of it flying without my active participation, as I’ve been busy sleeping, twitching, rolling around in pain, or sleeping and twitching in pain. This is not a sympathy call. It’s just fact. It’s a boring fact. It’s a fact anyone with a chronic illness or disease will recognise, and will share the same sense of boredom and more importantly, time lost.

And it’s why I am giving myself the gift of something inordinately special.

Time. And not just any time.

Time being a complete and utter miserable bastard.

No more being kind, which I try to make my default state. I’m going loud and proud GOF. No longer shall I keep my rants against cyclists with headphones in and a paucity of hand signals - not the Man Who Vaguely Resembles David Tennant, may I add, who has excellent cycling etiquette - behind my rolled up car windows. Those windows are going down, sister, and the megaphone is coming out.

I shall freely and vocally express my opinions about the many, many, many Darwin Award nominees with their heads in their mobile phones, roaming the streets of insert town or city here, blocking the footpaths, giving me stink eye when I dare to accidentally brush past them with my twenty-three bags of shopping. Standing stock still behind my car as I reverse in supermarket carparks, looking at me strangely when I toot the horn politely, and gazing wonderingly as if to say ‘oh, you’re in a car? How weird. I thought I was in the middle of an airport concourse’. (GRRRRROWLLL).

I shall continue to fight the good fight against all who park their bloody enormous SUVs across disabled car spaces, with added loudness. Ditto anyone who feels it’s okay to treat anyone with disability as second-class citizens, speaking across and above us to whomever able we are accompanied by, as if we’re a pet.

Climate denialists from ScoMo to Sky News will be even more scientifically backed grist to my grumpy old mill. Racists, bigots, and homophobes alike, cower at my thundering scorn! (As it was and ever more shall be; one doesn’t have to take out full membership in the GOF Party to simply do the right thing, people).

I have previously made it a priority to tell kids to pick up litter when they drop it on the pavement, so I was obviously a GOF in training, but now I shall do it when there is more than one of them, and not run away in fear of being called names by the ten year olds who live round the corner.

I shall add three more cats to our current household complement of two in order to gain full Crazy Cat Lady status, which is, I believe, in the GOF Membership Rulebook (Addendum 6A, Pets and Accessories). I may not tell The Man of this idea initially as I’d like to be a GOF with a spouse for longer than twenty seconds.

In short, I am going to have the time of my life. Because the time of my life, unlike my silhouette, is getting slimmer by the minute; and I intend to spend it being well and truly present.

Now move out of my way. I just spotted a cyclist on his mobile phone… and I swear he dropped some rubbish.

Hand me my megaphone.

Photo by Shahmie Mahmoud on Unsplash