The first signs of the inevitable decline into dementia and death are beginning to show now that I am passed my 40th birthday. I am having trouble understanding how to work most of the gadgets that I have acquired in the past few weeks. Once upon a time I was quite good with technology, but now something new bamboozles me for longer and longer and my frustration at my lack of understanding hits me harder and harder. I got a new phone last week and admittedly there are way too many functions on these new things, but I am finding it difficult to work anything more than the most basic ones, which rather counters the point of it being more than a phone. I have also been trying to set up the sat nav that I got for my birthday, but it doesn't seem to be docking properly with either my mac or my desk-top PC and for some reason now only has maps for North America on it. Which isn't very useful to me. Then when I try to update it it just goes blank. This may be a problem with the sat-nav itself and I must ring the company and get them to sort it, but I have a fear that it has mainly happene due to some elderly incompetence o my behalf. I would use my old sat nav, but I was going to give it to TV's Emma Kennedy and thought I was being clever in resetting it so that she could enter her info anew, but now it needs passcodes and information to boot up again and even though I found the box it came in with all the serial numbers on it, I still can't get the correct numbers entered to make it work. It makes me want to cry. I am overwhelmed by it and embarrassed to explain my ignorance to someone on the phone (and probably unable to use the phone anyway) and am tempted just to throw all these gadgets in the bin and go back to living in a cave (though I would never use a "map" - that is too far back into the dark ages for me). I have so relied on my sat nav in the last couple of years that I don't think I can do without one and of course I will get this sorted out, as it's too expensive a piece of equipment just to leave unused in a cupboard.
I am also becoming obsessed with plastic bags, which is a proper sign of old age. It comes from a good place - I am trying to cut down my plastic bag consumption (I don't eat them and anyone who says I do is lying) and so try to remember to take my bag for life bags out with me at all times when I am going shopping and also re-use old regular shopping bags as bin-liners, holding recycling and for my sports kits and so on. I have a big bin liner full of plastic bags from the days when I didn't worry about this issue and am trying to reduce it to nothing, but it's not really going down too much. Partly because new bags come into the house when I find I've forgotten to bring any old ones and partly because I am determined to get maximum use out of each bag before I fill it with rubbish or recycle it at the supermarket.
But my obsessions, once knowing and comic, are now getting crotchety and geriatric. I get quite annoyed when my friends arrive for poker bringing drinks and crisps in carrier bags and thus adding another five or six bags to my pile. I still know I am being ridiculous, but am aware I am only a matter of years away from being one of those angry old people, obsessed with trivia and furious when their routine is disturbed. I fear mental illness because my job involves skirting round the edge of it, like a child playing at seeing how close to the fire he can get. I know one day I will fall into the flames.
I got annoyed with myself today because I was going out to the supermarket and I took four bags for life with me, but decided I would also recycle a few of the many bags, even though I hadn't reused them. I took about eight of them with me and stuffed them into the small and packed box that Sainsbury's put aside for recycled bags - looking in at the tills and seeing how few people had brought bags with them and how many new bags were being added to the world, knowing that most of them would end up unused again. I felt a bit bad that some of the bags I was recycling were perfectly good for reuse and knew in an optimum world I should have run them into the ground before recycling, but at least I was being better than nearly everyone else in the shop.
However, the reason I got annoyed was that I ended up doing a bigger shop than I intended, so I easily filled my bags for life and at the check out was forced to take two regular plastic bags for the rest of my shopping. I could have reused the bags I had recycled, but instead I had not only not reused them, I had added two extra bags to the mound of plastic bags flying around in the world today. I was still six bags up as I had recycled eight and taken away two, but felt stupid for not waiting til after the shop to recycle and slightly angry with myself.
Like a mental old person would.
And that was the really worrying thing. As of course although my actions might not be perfect enough to satisfy the most mental correspondent of the richardherring.com guestbook (and wow that's an accolade to out-mental all of those lunatics), I had actually been reasonably conscientious, certainly compared to everyone else. But the mad part of my brain is actually more concerned with the bags than the environmental issues and for eight perfectly usuable ones being placed for recycling I had somehow wasted the precious resource, even though ultimately I want to get rid of the bags. It's craziness.
For the moment I see it's craziness and so that's OK - it makes for a mildly amusing Warming Up - but I had a vision of myself, unshaven and white haired, living alone in a house with rooms packed with plastic bags, all of whom have names and which are my only friends, having lost touch with reality and having created my own. It's not funny, because it's almost certainly going to come true. I am playing with fire, thinking I can control fire, but soon enough the fire will be in charge.
