WALDEN’S WORLD

The day I glimpsed my married life to come…

It was only a week ago that I flew to the South of France with my upbeat 55-yearold husband. Yet today, I find myself married to a rancorous and hard-of-hearing nonagenarian on crutches, with a never-ending list of demands.

What happened in between? Swimmer’s ear, for one thing. Then a midnight yomp across a vineyard, a pothole, a torn Achilles tendon and A&E.

It’s enough to age any of us by half a century, granted. But this? This is eerie. It’s as though I’ve been fastforwarded 30 years into my marriage, and every time I holler out phrases like “Now let’s get you comfortable somewhere shady”, “Do you need another pillow, dear?” and “I’m putting the tea here, so be careful”, I’m reminded of Billy Crystal’s famous monologue in City Slickers.

Urging a classroom full of eight-year-olds to “Value this time in your life, kids”, he proceeds to work his way through the increasingly depressing decades, culminating in the 70s – when “You and the wife… start eating dinner at two in the afternoon, you have lunch around ten, breakfast the night before, and spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt and muttering: ‘How come the kids don’t call?’” – and the 80s, when “you’ll have a major stroke, and end up babbling with some Jamaican nurse who your wife can’t stand, but who you call mama”. Of course, that entire monologue will now have been “cancelled”. Which only makes me love it more.