It don't bear thinking about

A scoop of porridge in a dish of bone. A database on legs. Sorry but I just cannot help thinking about it, although when I look in the mirror I can deceive myself that it is not like that at all. (I am looking in the side of the shaving mirror that makes your face go all bulgy. A big nose and chin and your eyes somewhere at the back. Convex, is it called? It makes all the spots and blemishes stand out, your skin look like an old wash-leather.)
Wait a minute – I hope this is a convex mirror. I don’t really look like that, do I?

Anyway, just now I cannot believe there is a skull there, hiding behind that old familiar face. Nor can I believe this body is just hanging on a skeleton – like a suit of clothes in a wardrobe. This is ME.

And that, back there in the bedroom, is CAROLE – a real, live, warm and breathing person. I mean I have not just been sleeping with a skeleton! Have I?

I saw a skeleton in a museum. He was over 500 years old. They know it is a ‘he’ because of the shape of the pelvic bones – quite different from those of a woman. But that’s the only way (so they tell me). All the ‘bits’ that distinguish male from female have disappeared long ago: penis, testicles, breasts, womb, ovaries – all that stuff. Gone, ‘the way of all flesh’. Wasn’t there a book by that title?

But I was thinking: from the day we are born we are living on borrowed time.

What time is it? I go back in the bedroom and look at the digital clock radio: 8:15. I think digital clocks tell a different sort of time from those with hands: analogue if you want to be posh. I mean, with a clock with hands you can actually see chunks of time. You see the hand having to move from here to there; the space in between is sort of tangible – if you see what I mean.

8:15! We’re going to be late for breakfast! Mrs Wincey doesn’t like it if you’re late for breakfast. I think she feels it’s insulting to her black-puddings.

Come on Carole. You lazy cow. And I shake her – and I hear the skeleton rattle.