Onward

I woke this morning to a new age, one in which I am labeled a year older than I was when I woke yesterday.  Strangely I feel no different.  Yesterday was the seventy-first anniversary of my arrival on this planet.  I marked the occasion by driving into the Tagetos mountains to enjoy lunch with Lisi at the Touristico Hotel on the summit of the Kalamata to Sparta road.  For the last few Kilometres before reaching the hotel I was driving between piles of snow-ploughed snow on a slushy snow-dusted road.  The hotel car park was covered with ankle-deep snow; the dining room was chilly but we found reasonably warm comfort at a vacant table near to a roaring, open wood fire.  During lunch snow began to fall.  A recently arrived family party occupying an adjacent table took fright, re-cloaked, gloved, scarfed and left to seek safer accommodation lower down the mountain.  By the time we departed, our car had become covered with a blanket of snow under which a rough coating of ice had frozen over the windscreen.  It was with some trepidation that I drove away from the hotel along a steeply-descending snow-covered road but there was little traffic to concern me and after fifteen minutes of so of very slow going we safely reached clear tarmac.

Will I remember this birthday?  As I can remember nothing of the other seventy it is unlikely.  If memorable birthdays are important, the fifth of January is not the best of dates to be born; particularly when they fall on a Monday!