The Test of Time

I have written here before that I am taking part in a study about ageing. The study is known as TILDA (or HOTDOG to readers of this blog), and will monitor the progress of selected over-50s as we age through the coming years.

I’ve already done the home interview and the written questionnaire, and today was the third part, the health assessment. I’ve just returned from three hours in the TILDA Centre, having faced more tests than an alien turning up unexpectedly in Roswell. In other words, I’ve been HOTDOG’s jumping frog.

And so, rather bizarrely, has Mrs Tin. Although she’s still a long way short of 50 (and I’ve typed that sentence without her even standing over me while I did it) they apparently need the partners of over-50s to take the tests too. I can only assume that they want to establish whether young wans fall apart quicker if they spend too much time in the company of older men, rather as owners of bulldogs will grow to look like them over time.

Anyway, I was given memory tests, eyesight tests, blood pressure tests, heart-rate tests (bit of a surprise for them there). I did one of those awful tests where you have to match shapes, or pick the next one in a sequence from a range of options. This is the type of test I was always shite at in school, the type which persuaded me from an early age never to attempt engineering, or to try to assemble anything bought in IKEA.

As a natural show-off  (huh, never would have guessed, I hear you say)  I proudly read the eye-chart practically down to the makers’ name at the bottom, called back the list of words I had to memorise not just correctly, but in the order that I was given them, and came up with 32 words beginning with ‘F’ in just one minute (I’d have done even better here, but unfortunately the word “fellatio” entered my head (um, unfortunate choice of phrase there) and for a panic-stricken five seconds I could think of nothing else before the word “falafel” thankfully arrived to rescue me.

They measured my weight and height, and I hope that those of you who’d love to weigh less will not hate me when I say that I was delighted to learn that I am the heaviest I’ve ever been. I am 10 stone 1 pound, and as a man who never weighed more than eight stone until I was 30 (thanks to the Tinman Diet, consisting of 40 cigarettes a day and no food, I should bring out a book) I regard this as great news.

I wasn’t so thrilled about the height, though. I have always regarded myself as being five-foot-five-and-a-half, and have persuaded myself that the “and-a-half” is what prevents me from being a real short-arse. It seems, though, that I am five-foot-five (I got her to do it twice, and then made her show me), and can almost hear the inner me sneering “huh, you think you’re a big fella, don’t ya”.

I’ve always found it interesting that there are only little old ladies. The phrase “tall old ladies” does not exist. So I’m hoping that I was just wrong about my height all along, since otherwise my belief that you grow shorter as you grow older must be true.

And if I’ve lost half an inch already, then by the time I’m 80 I’ll only be visible under a microscope.