0.333 recurring

Submitted by mike on Fri, 2008-02-01 13:10.

Mike hits 50 - yes one third of my life over already and looking forward to my midlife crisis when I am 75. Medical science and Mike have kept step with each other and no-one is surprised more than my doctors as to age so far. They keep sending me risk assessment appointments, as if the anthrax drum incident, russian mafia thug attack, car, plane and train crashes were not enough to show that risk aversion and Mike tread separate paths through this life.

To celebrate and to snatch my last hours of my pilots licence before it expires I flew to Dundee Airport. Graeme and Kim on one plane and Mike and his petrol tank in another with an aide-memoire of RT speak written on the bar mitts I flew over the Forth at a somewhat chilly altitude of 6,000 feet before encountering Leuchars air traffic control. Requesting 'MATZ Penetration' as if asking a two dollar hooker if she did happy hours, I flew over the new runways to descend (strangely you don't get to ask for MATZ Withdrawl but are passed unceremonously onto Dundee Approach as if your performance didn't warrant a shared cigarette).

Dundee Airport on a Sunday was only missing the tumbleweed rolling over the runway. However naturally I was the one that had to hold over the Tay Road Bridge as a jet approaches over the city and lands showering onlookers with aviation fuel fumes as it roars into reverse thrusts. I had a less impressive entrance (stop tittering at the back) and in the strong wind floated over the Tay Rail Bridge and fields of footballers and touched down smoothly. Backtracked to where Kim and Graeme tied me down with a concrete block and we made our exit through the flying club and into the silent empty terminal. Silent and empty except for security who insisted that we go through a security check - that was when I realised that I had a large yachting knife (to cut me free from wreckage) which would have alerted even the sleepiest security officer. Fortunately they only wanted one person to go through to pay the landing fees and they perhaps didn't fancy body searching myself so Graeme volunteered for the body search when his life jacket buckles set off the metal detector.

Lunched at the Richard Murphy Contemporary Arts Centre (splendid building and lunch) then flew back in a gale to join the circuit facing in the wrong direction and landed safely if somewhat abruptly at East Fortune. The Club had the candles on and I blew out the five candles 10 times to give everyone a piece of saliva on the well named Chocolatey cake (more chocolate than cake at Thorntons)

Birthday dinner at the stylish Dakota near the Forth Road Bridge started with drinks - the waiter came with a pint of stout and a champage cocktail and looked confused when we said that it was Kim that was drinking the stout and Mike the cocktail as he put them down at the wrong person. Chilled Oysters and Steak Tartare washed down with various overpriced wines and Kim retired to test the toilets.
The snooty waitress sidled up and asked if my wife would like a dessert. I replied 'two things', one I cannot speak for the lady so please wait for her return, and secondly she is not my wife, but my new mistress. She was less snooty after that and gave Kim what she can only describe as pitying looks. My toilet was a bit more adventurous as I was still wearing my thermal underwear so had to stand at the urinal with my trousers around my knees unpeeling the layers...

Now I am of pensionable age (yes really) I managed to prise some information from Equitable Life as to my options and what a remarkably complex tale it is too. One imagines that pensions are a good tax avoiding scheme until you come to actually enjoy the fruits of the avoidance.
Twenty Five percent max is returned as tax free stash to be frittered away in an attempt to reduce the remaining period of living when they pay you some pittance from a annuity based on more people will die leaving money for the survivors like some grim lottery. One suggestion was to emigrate to Australia where pensions are taxed differently and given I am typing this in a blizzard that option is tempting. Annuities are also based on location longevity (I must rent a place in downtown Glasgow) and general health issues (obesity and smoking are suddenly things to have and do) as it is all down to the probability of death. Have these people not seen my driving and travelling stories?

Talking of mid life crisis obviously the motorbike is in the garage and the CBT training websites being pored over. Watch this space.

It turns out that most of Lempitlaw were born in January so the annual birthday bash is growing in number with a consolidated dinner.
There was no burns supper this year at the Curling Club but we went along to come 4th bottom in the pub quiz where my insistence that my answers were correct remained constant whereas my accuracy diminished with each pint of Worthington's Pale Ale. I almost got the 'which is the largest inhabited castle in Scotland?' question wrong which would have been a mite embarrassing since it is the local Floors Castle.
Lempitlaw itself is being remodelled with new passing places ironically causing delays as the lorries building them block the roads, and the steading being turned into housing for families who want to move to the country yet have no gardens.

I reread the Neil Gaiman Sandman series of graphic novels which tend to spawn off interests in other things and for some reason I am embroiled in the Elizabethan era (segueing into Henry the Eight too with the fascinating disease 'English Sweate' and his wives) with books and movies on magicians and spymasters and the great Queen herself. Fascinating period.

My new variofocal glasses were picked up from Berwick allowing lunch and a visit to the talking toilet. For 20p for 15 minutes maximum (emergency button in case of constipation) you enter a tardis and get soothingly talked to whilst on the steel loo and find out with all this technology it has still run out of toilet paper.

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