FAT, FORTY AND REDUNDANT

Talk about a triple whammy. It wasn’t one of my better years I must say, being made redundant the year I turned 40 – sure to induce a mid-life crisis, on top of losing count of the number of years spent unsuccessfully battling the bulge and feeling like a beach ball with arms and legs, needless to say my self esteem took a fairly steep nosedive!

I’d had a great ten years in a much loved job in animal welfare, earning a reasonable living, enjoying my independence and making plans for the future when, bam, the whole lot came crashing down around my ears and I suddenly had no idea what I was going to do to fix the mess.

So… I embarked on a journey.

First and foremost, I had to get another job. It was daunting to be facing yet another career change at 40 but I retrained to be a driving instructor. I love teaching and helping to change peoples lives but the job provides a fairly high degree of stress and can test your patience somewhat when your learner is sitting at a red light revving the gas like fuel is free, burning the clutch until the stench is unbearable and flames are leaping out from underneath your bonnet (okay, so I exaggerate a little) but you get the picture! When you’ve got a queue of irate, horn honking, fist waiving impatient drivers behind you, it takes a great deal of willpower not to get out the car myself with a double-barrelled shotgun but I don’t suppose that would set a particularly good example. It’s a job and it pays the bills, if only just given the current inflation busting cost of living, but it’s not where I ultimately want to be. It is a means to an end at the moment while I find another way to earn my millions or my knight in shining armour on his flying Arab charger, gets his finger out and finally beats a path to my door.

Next, as my working hours at last allowed, I got myself a much wanted dog. She’s called Holly and she’s a four year old black lab who’s had a pretty rotten life so far. She’s been forced to have litter after litter of puppies, been stuck in a cage and fed rubbish and hence is a rather portly young lady in dire need of a strict diet and exercise regime. Yes, I know, we’ve got so much in common. At least I can walk a little further than her. I took her a slightly longer than normal walk the other day and she had to have a lie down half way through. Being the size of a small bear, carrying her home was completely out of the question. I thought I was going to have to go home, get the car and come back and pick her up, either that or get on the hotline to Bernard Hunter and get him to pop over with one of his cranes. We eventually made it home only for her to collapse in a heap on the living room floor and start her outrageous wall shaking, window shattering snoring. Bless her, her excess folds of skin affect her nasal passages resulting in this socially questionable behaviour never endearing in a lady – yes, okay, another thing we have in common!

Next step in my life changing journey was to get a personal trainer. I was managing to do quite a lot of swimming but I wanted to do more and besides, there’s always one directionally challenged swimmer that does widths while everyone else is doing lengths and it can get a tad annoying! Anyway, back to Tarzan (my trainer, my nickname!), he’s very easy on the eye but he’s certainly not easy on me! He puts me through my paces every week at the gym and I sometimes I think his sole objective is to kill me as I crawl out the gym every Sunday night on my hands and knees, begging for mercy, but I have to believe it’s doing me good. I’m on a mission! I’m going to ignore the fact that I’m on the wrong side of forty, probably more likely to be run over by a steamroller than find a nice non Neanderthal, non knuckle scraping, chest beating man who doesn’t feel emasculated by an independent woman with a brain, and I’m going to reinvent myself. Forty’s the new thirty as they say and it is my educated belief that age only really matters if you’re a cheese or a fine wine, so here goes……I hope you’ll join me on my continued journey to being Fit, Fabulous and well….Forty plus!