@farmerman,
Quote:On the weekend of Sept 23 to 25, I attended a field trip of the PA Geologists Field Conference and it was led by a geologist who is well known in the craft as one of the lenfant terribles of the age of Continental Drift. He was there at its inception and was a teacher to many of us. ANyway the guy is 81 years, sharp as a razor and slight of build, beerdrinking proselytizer of good science and as spry as a chipmunk. He wore many of us out and I made aresolution to get back into some kind of better shape so I can scramble up and down the outcrops like I did 30 years ago. He certainly could and he didnt even puff.
Im amazed at the two schools of geezerhood.
1.I cant do the things I want anymore and im resigned to the fact.
Well fm--apart from complimenting you on the decrease in the rate of typos and only the odd solecism, I might say, on behalf, I hope, of the others in our noble and venerable gathering, that I am grateful that you address us in such an amusing style. It really does capture Walter Shandy as I imagine he would be if he were among us now. But minus the scholarship which is only to be expected in 2010 when scholarship has sunk to the level of who can shout assertions loudest and longest.
Every Old Folks Home should have a Walter Shandy and I have no doubt a goodly number have. It makes us nostalgic for that way of talking which we grew up with.
What I can't understand is why, if your new-found friend and exemplar is as sharp as a razor and as spry as a chipmunk, he wasn't cuddled up in a sleeping bag with one of the slutty students in a tent rather than jumping up rocky outcrops and whatnot in your admiring company. If I were counsel for chipmunks I would demand £20 million compensation for such a slanderous besmirchment of our long-standing evolutionary reputation. A more literary person would have said, if only to avoid mixing the metaphor, that he was as sharp as a razor in the Rolls stropping machine operated by a chap with a delicate skin in a big hurry. And hinted everso gracefully that he was in this fix because he is in denial of the forces of nature and entropy generally whereas we here in Sunset Vistas, free at the point of delivery, are settling in to "talk ourselves down" as the pilot of an airplane might do when all the circuits have fused.
I hope you're not going to end up running around the local lanes in shorts with a haversack full of bricks on your back and coming in here bouncing on the balls of your feet going "up-two-three-four" and lecturing us on the evils of smoking and drinking and sitting in armchairs watching shadowy shapes doing wierd and wonderful things in far distant locations prior to drifting off to sleep and dreaming of times gone by. There's few whiffling vexations a man might come across in his passage through this vale of tears, woe and drear despond as vexatious as a fitness fanatic.
Sit down, drink your cocoa and have a shot at this Valerian snuff.
