Wrinkles
blogObsessing over mortality when you’re young is like obsessing over the final whistle when you’re midway through the first half. It is a distraction and one that makes your game suffer.
On the other hand, making sure that you’re not exhausted by the end of the second half could be the difference between playing a full game and being substituted (as I was yesterday).
If there is one thing that hockey gives me, it is new metaphors for thinking about life. They’re not particularly good or original metaphors, but they are servicable.
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The other day Laura pointed out to me that I am getting wrinkles on my chin (although my Mother thinks they are better described as creases). I think the combination of lots of physical exertion and having become slightly leaner that has brought them out. I feigned concern about looking like Gordon Ramsay, but secretly I quite like wrinkles. I think they make people look distinguished and Beckettian.
Looking for something to read as I soaked my aching muscles in the bath, I bent down for my old copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book that influenced me greatly as a young man. What I didn’t pick up on then was how blatantly homosexual the book is. I suppose I believed that men could have a really intimate yet platonic relationship. Who knew?
What I liked was all the Lord Henry Wotton stuff about hedonism, the pursuit of sensual pleasure and beauty. It is this which gets Gray in trouble as he ‘ruins’ various people in society and gets up to no good in the East End of London. What he actually does there is never described, but it must have been pretty bad for his portrait to become so disgusting. Ironically, none of his possible vices (and maybe I am too innocent to know about some of them) seem very bad to us today: sodomy is practically a national institution, gambling is advertised everywhere, nowadays gourmandizing, heavy drinking, drug taking and promiscuity are considered acceptable, if not de rigeur, in polite society. Unless he was child raping out in Shoreditch, it is difficult to believe that Dorian Gray would be much frowned upon in modern Britain.
One thing I take issue with in the book is the idea that every man gets the face he deserves. I see lots of poor people in Glasgow on whose face is written the struggle to make a living, but I don’t think they deserve such a face. The lines on my own face, which in a spirit of scientific enquiry I will be documenting on my foto blog over the next few days, are possibly more deserved.