THE FRINGE

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A winter walk

I’ve just come in from a walk.

For the benefit of you younger folks, walking is what retired old reprobates do to fill in time between meals and meetings.

Walking helps maintain a level of fitness that allows you to live longer and thus draw more extensively from the national pension fund. Doesn’t it make you all feel so good to be contributing toward my upkeep?

You can’t make me feel bad about it because between March 3, 1947 and Sept. 30, 1991, I mumbled and muttered about supporting the previous generation.

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This winter’s snow has added to the level of exercise provided by walking. It’s all packed down, of course, but the dozens of school-bound kids who packed it down left a lumpy mattress. However, I should be grateful to them because a packed uneven surface beats wading a couple of miles through soft snow.

(A mile is an archaic English term meaning 1.61 kilometres so a couple of miles is 3.22 km.) That’s rather a puny walk but the older you get the less impressive your bragging becomes.

Some of we archaic Canadians have even been known to respond in Fahrenheit when asked the temperature. It sounds impressive to us but when it is tried on the above-mentioned school kids one is not communicating.

Actually, that’s fair enough because when I sit down to listen to the slang of the coming generation I need a pocket translator.

A generation ago we had hat check girls. Today they’ve expanded the service industry to the point that they now have spice girls.

On that spicy note, I’m off for my post-walk cooling down exercise – a snooze.