The Last Cartwheel

The Last Cartwheel.

“One day, you’ll do your last cartwheel.”  Those were the words of Oliver Freeman, a young gentleman with whom I had the pleasure of working with for a while as a utility arborist.  We were discussing cartwheels and general work-place nonsense when he came out with that gem.  This simple statement was perhaps more profound to myself than Oliver realised at the time, for I am much older than he, and becoming increasingly aware that aging is essentially an insidious, creeping list of things you used to be able to do but not anymore.

I’ve already climbed my last tree, in fact it is probably down to years of climbing trees for a living that I now have a painful, arthritic left shoulder and detached bicep, and in turn, the reason I came off the tools a couple of years ago and don’t climb trees anymore.  I’ve certainly played my last football game; entering a works football tournament in my late forties turned out to be a bad idea as it left me with a groin strain; I hope I never have to outrun a hungry tiger because I’m getting eaten.

So here I am, on Croy Shore in Ayrshire, Scotland, out for a walk with my daughter Charlotte who does cartwheels with similar gusto and wild abandon as I would have done twenty-four years ago, and in a moment of madness, I convinced myself to have a go while she took my photograph.  A shock of instant regret and eye-watering pain burned through my left shoulder as I executed the most inelegant cartwheel of my life. That night, I was raiding my mum’s stash of Co-codamol and Ibuprofen.  I’m glad we caught it on camera, because I’m never doing that again.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my last cartwheel.