good moaning

“Good moaning”.  Thus my friend Roger greets me as I enter the gym this morning.  (You may have met him before).

I return the greeting.  We do this every Tuesday.  On days when we’re not able to attend through illness, or for more mundane reasons, we email each other with this greeting in the subject line.  So we know what to expect.  We’ve become each other’s moan-buddy.

Roger and I are the same age, we share the same passion for music and we have the same cancer history.  We even shared (although we didn’t know it at the time) the same “bag-lady” (stoma nurse).  There is nothing we don’t know about the internal workings of each other’s plumbing.  And it’s purely by chance that we ended up attending the same exercise facility.

We tell each other things we don’t always tell our wives.  Largely because they’ve heard it all before.  The subject of our moans is almost always the same.  Occasionally we go off-piste and moan about the driving habits of people we’ve had to negotiate on our way in, or the previous night’s TV.  

But what really separates us from any other pair of grumpy old men, is our favourite topic - the thing we really do moan about more than anything.  And that is our inability - or unwillingness - to accept that cancer (and specifically the side effects of its treatment) has aged us in someway.  Roger feels about 10 years older than he should.  That manifests itself in not how he looks phyically, but in what he can no longer do.  And I can’t disagree with that.

Our doctors tell us that we’re just getting older - that we’re not as young as we used to be.  “You can’t put the clock back.  You have to start again from now” is a favourite platitude.  We know all this.  But knowing it doesn’t change anything.

Our moaning is not based on ingratitude for all that the NHS has done for us.  Far from it.  It is simply the frustration that comes from a mind that is running far ahead of its body.  We are both people who have led active lives.  And simple things, like cold weather, that stop old men, stop us now.  

And because we both recognise that we are playing an old record far too frequently to those around us, we have developed the knack of sharing a pair of headphones, much like record shops in the 1960s and playing this one soley for the benefit of each other.

Today Roger moans about the fact, as he often does, that he’s had to get someone in to do a job that he usually does himself.  I’m able to listen as if it’s the first time I’ve heard it.   He affords me the same courtesy as I repeat back to him the same thing, the following week.

The 10 minutes we spend moaning at the start of each session has become more than ritual and is just as important as the hour or so we spend on physical exercise.  It’s part of our rehabilitation.  In the process we’ve become experts on each other’s condition.   Which by some quirk of fate turns out to be our own.