On Legs and the Gain in Giving.

My walk back to the car from the town centre today brought me into close proximity with a crowd of upper high school students whose route coincided with mine. Approximately half the group were boys wearing trousers and the other half were girls wearing shorts or short skirts. It was a warm and sunny day, and so for a terrible few minutes I walked alongside a forest of bare ladies’ legs, all of them fresh, finely wrought and mind-numbingly unblemished. And when our routes diverged I had to walk through that forest to access the side street I wanted. It wasn’t easy.

I say ‘terrible’ for one simple and perfectly innocent reason: when you reach the age at which one of your major, lifelong aspirations is no longer available to you, the sense of frustration is keenly felt and the realisation of something lost most poignant.

This is nothing to feel guilty about, and indeed I don’t. This is no leeringly lascivious product of the Id, no Ageing Lothario delusion. Men sometimes ask the hoary old question: ‘Are you a breast man or a leg man?’ How does somebody like me answer that question? I’m an eyes man, a voice man, a smile man, a hair man, a mind man, a personality man. Most of all, I suppose, I’m a presence man. But yes, I admit it, I’m also a leg man, and in a crowd of young women it’s the legs which are most apparent. And so I feel a sense of sorrow which I expect will last as long as I do, and maybe even get worse as time goes by.

This is one of the very few things about which I feel a little bitter. I don’t generally suffer from habitual bitterness, but this is different. Why would any creator deity place a finely-honed instinct into the mind and then allow the tyrant time to prevent us from exercising it? Why do I have to stop seeking the opposite polarity at its most perfect so that the battery of personal life can be the best it can be? It’s cruel, no more and no less, and I do so abhor cruelty.

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And yet, by way of contrast, I did make physical contact with two delightful ladies today, but they were not upper high school students. They were miniature Shetland ponies being shown off to the passing shoppers by the charity which uses them – among others, apparently – to give animal assisted therapy to disabled children. Cute-and-friendly animals are, after all, a good ploy to draw people in; and once in, people feel guilty about walking away again without giving a donation. But no matter the near-Machiavellian nature of the ploy. I talked with one of the humans at some length and learned a thing or two. That, the petting of the Shetland ponies, and a measure of sympathy with the cause led my donation to be bigger than most.

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A little later I gave a young man a new pack of Rizlas because he said he’d left his own at home and was dying for a fag. He was a little rough-hewn and a little rough-shod and I surmised he hadn’t the 25p to buy a pack from the nearby store. And he had a good presence. Presence is so important to me when it comes to assessing people. And because he was a young bloke and not a young woman, his legs mattered not a jot.

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And so it was a day of both perceived loss and the giving to worthy causes, which at least offers a balance of sorts. And giving does attract a certain measure of personal gain, don’t you think? I do.