Get Down. Get On Down.

If you were here with me today, sitting here in the wagon, you would likely hear me singing away to myself. I do it all the time. Singing. Sometimes I pick up my guitar and have a strum. Pretending I know all the right chords to some tune or other that just happens to brush past my grey matter. Sometimes I will make up a song. Just a couple of lines, and sing it to the few chords I do know.

This doesn't mean I'm happy. I sing when I'm down too. I'm down right now. Have been for a day or two. Still singing away though, and not sad songs necessarily. It is just as likely to be some upbeat tempo that is exercising the old vocal chords. Singing a happy song and feeling as miserable as sin. Try and explain that away. I can't.

I honestly can't. Sometimes I try and get to the reason or reasons behind my melancholy. And sometimes I think I get it, but then another thought gets in the way and that becomes the reason. What keeps me going though, what stops me descending into the black abyss that once, perhaps thirty or more years ago, took me in it's grasp and held me so low for many months, is the knowledge that I will soon bounce back to my cheerful self.

The path to old age is getting steeper. It is more and more difficult to dig my heels in and slow it down. I feel it pulling me onward. I need more time. There are so many things I still have to do.

Or are there? Perhaps I kid myself? Maybe I am happy to get old? Settle into a routine dullness? Although I have never been one for routine. This may be a reaction to becoming institutionalised when I was a youngster. A kickback against the normality that so many take for granted?

Strange isn't it, because looking back, the most settled times in my life have been when routine has been there. Care homes, navy, detention, prison. All things where, without routine anarchy would prevail.

Is that it do you think? Routine? Is that the answer? And discipline of course. The two go together. It's probably too late for me to take that path now. Too set in my ways. How ironic is that? Hates routine and yet set in my ways. Makes me want to laugh. Laugh? Yes I do that too when I'm down.

This has been a miserable old bloke rambling. And I am sorry to inflict it on you. I will be back soon and I will be wondering where the hell all this came from. I have to go now, there is a song coming on.