Malachi ODoherty - On My Own Two Wheels: Back in the Saddle at 60

It started with a pinprick and a glass of Lucozade, or something similarly gloopy and sweet. I had asked my doctor to screen me for diabetes. I was in a risk category I was fat and I had had stomach troubles and I knew I wasnt as fit as I should be. Now I was at the doctors surgery, in the hands of a nurse with plastic gloves on, a needle that didnt look too threatening and a little electronic monitor.

The first reading of my blood sugar level was 8.3. I had been fasting from the night before.

Is that high?

Well, we have to send a sample away for a proper reading. Drink this.

She handed me a glass of the rich sugary warm! liquid and encouraged me to drink it down. It slithered into me.

Now wait in the reception area for two hours and well test you again. She had the manner of someone acting on legal advice and clearly wasnt going to say anything that might either increase or assuage my anxieties. I have seen policemen in the witness stand who were garrulous by comparison.

Two hours is a long time in a waiting area, watching other people come and go. A reporter I know came in and sat beside me for a minute to say hello. I discovered that the common exchanges we make with each other dont apply when you think the other person might be ill and you dont want to probe. You dont say, Hi, are you well? You say, I hope things are fine with you; have a good day.

The sugary drink had made me giddy, but that soon settled and my mind began to play over what had brought me to this test. One thing was age. I was approaching my sixtieth birthday and I wasnt happy about that at all. As the birthday approached, my wife Maureen hinted at the idea of a party and I told her I could see nothing at all to celebrate about getting older and inching closer to decrepitude and death. I had been similarly morose on my fiftieth. Then, Maureen had brought me breakfast on a tray with a card and a present and said, Happy birthday. I said, Whats there to be happy about? a birthday just marks time passing and running out.

But my sixtieth was worse. Many of the people I had looked up to and learnt from had finished their lifes work at sixty or before. At fifty I had wondered what sixty would be like and I sat in a meeting for an arts-type committee with others, talking about age because Id told them it was my birthday and about the meaning of different periods in life. One of the company was a man of sixty and to me he looked slack and unfocused, amiable and harmless. The thought that that was coming to me was just demoralising. It didnt occur to me that he might have been slack and unfocused at twenty as well.

Friends tried to reason with me: Whats the point in being miserable about being sixty when you cant change it? I replied, So youre only allowed to be unhappy about things you can change? Life is limited; there isnt enough of it. Thats awful.

The number of years available to me now seemed too easy to encompass in my imagination. In twenty years I would be eighty. You dont see a lot of fat eighty-year-olds out on the street. I could cast my mind back easily to when I was forty, facing a similar need to reassess myself, and it seemed just a few months back. For its worse than time just running out like sands through an hourglass; time accelerates as you grow older. The decade between being twenty and thirty is about twice as long as the one between forty and fifty. Check it yourself.

I was resolved to live into my nineties anyway, though if I am honest I would really like another fifty or sixty years beyond that; by that stage I am sure I will have got the hang of the things that matter.

Another reason for my visit to the nurse was that I knew I wasnt fit. I have a twin brother Roger. We are so alike that people could not tell the difference between us when we were growing up. The previous summer we had together walked up Knocklayde, the mountain that looms over Ballycastle in County Antrim. That was fun, though we took a ridiculously circuitous route that ended in a steep climb. He made it to the top and I had to give up. Now, that shouldnt happen with twins. As children, our classmates would sometimes pit us against each other in arm-wrestling matches that were usually deadlocked. Now two stone lighter, and clearly fitter, he was climbing mountains that defeated me.

The two hours passed and the nurse with the plastic gloves was pricking me again.

What is it this time? Again, she didnt want to say. I didnt know then that I could have bought one of those testers for under a tenner and found out the figure for myself. I know a lot more about diabetes now.

Its 11.8, she finally told me.

Still, it was only numbers.

Does that mean I am diabetic?

Its in that area.

Well, what would be a worrying figure?

If it was over twenty we probably wouldnt let you go home.

The result only confirmed what Id already suspected. Even before the test I had started to make changes. I had been walking more; even bought myself a pair of MBTS. Those are the big clumpy shoes that are brilliantly branded as making you effectively barefoot Barefoot Technology though they are as thick as bricks. They are the sort of thing that would have been sold twenty years ago as approved by doctors and nobody would have bought them. The M stands for Masai; you can be a Masai warrior with bricks on your feet. Pure marketing genius!

This was shaping up to be one of those cusp-of-decade moments in my life when I resolved to make big changes. Securing a stable and sane relationship had been one of my fortieth birthday resolutions. I had been married to Maureen for most of the period since. In the comfort of our marriage I had filled out nicely and slowed down. I hadnt been up enough mountains and I hadnt been out on my bicycle for over a decade. Now, when I sat at the table for dinner I had a belly that seemed to sit on my lap like an importunate child asking for ice cream or another glass of wine. I had just accepted that gradual fattening was a normal part of ageing and that I was turning into a tubby man who wasnt meant to ride a bike.