The Gloom and The Rapture of Menopause

Years ago I heard the Welsh comedian, Max Boyce, describe attending a friend’s funeral. The mourners were assembled at the graveside when word  began to filter through that Wales had lost a rugby match.  The immortal Boyce recalled how the news “cast a gloom over the whole occasion”. I love that story.

Gloom is much in evidence in Ireland at the moment, particularly amongst the upwardly mobile – i.e. those aged 50 and over who, increasingly find themselves sounding like their parents as they observe the effects of the present cold spell on the joints, discuss at length the symptoms of their ailing peers, note with alarming regularity the passing of former friends and colleaguea, sympathise with the gallstone ridden, the obese, the verbose, and the invisible.

‘Invisible?’, you ask. Invisible is what women over-50 become – particularly in the workplace, on the street, and everywhere bar public transport where, alarmingly, young men now stand to give up their seats.

And yet how wonderful life is that we can endure and howl with laughter at our afflictions much as did our forebears. So this New Year we will raise a glass of kindness for our own sakes and for the sake of auld lang syne.

Slainte, a chairde.  Good health my friends.