Health is wealth.

Specifically, physical wellness and mobility is wealth. For the last five weeks, and for the first time in my life, I haven’t had full mobility and it’s been an absolutely fucking miserable experience.

As hardships or ordeals go, compared to people starving in sub-Saharan Africa, those managing to survive under siege in Gaza, or having to take your kids to a Taylor Swift concert (even if the tickets are free for a certain cohort of grasping twats), it’s a minor one.

And yes, I’m one of those people who bought into regular exercise, sauna, good quality food, limited sugar intake, definitely no soft drinks, no drugs, no booze as the balm which would help maintain suppleness and strength as the years accumulated. But as a spry (this is a euphemism for fitness devotee) person, now I know this dedication and discipline has a downside, when illness or disability hits, you lose far more than a sedentary slob would.

Rolling around on an office chair to get to the toilet or the kitchen and going up the stairs a step at a time on my backside, just to avoid excruciating pain, was humiliating. More alarming was how quickly I adapted to my new normal, forming logistical solutions to cope better. I’m being disingenuous and melodramatic here. This wasn’t a missing limb or a seeing out a terminal disease, it was badly tweaked ankle that would surely recover with rest and time.

Throughout I was confounded by why the ligaments in left ankle, for want of better word, melted without undue duress. Ligament sprain, is, I suspect, the answer here, only there was no obvious cause: I didn’t twist my ankle awkwardly and violently, there was no slipping on a step, no twinge of a warning to suggest I was to be cowed to this degree. There was a feeling of tightness, followed by awaking in agony one morning, and finally melon sized swelling. Worse yet, it presented a grim realisation – perhaps this random malaise is the start of my physical decline.

After a week I could stand without being in agony, but still not walk without the ankle joint nipping. But just when I thought the worst was over the pain bizarrely migrated from my ankle to my big toe joint, and it started stinging so badly that I only managed ten hours of sleep in the space of a week. It’s at this point I wobbled and began to wallow in self-pity at the unfairness of it. Thankfully I didn’t retreat into a mode of vainglorious cliched denial that I wasn’t healing as quickly as I likely would’ve done years ago, say by getting an earring, liposuction, or highlights in my hair for the first time as forty-something. Even at my most despondent I failed to reach the zenith of irascibility Nicolas Cage’s character achieves in Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call New Orleans, where, suffering from a degree of opioid withdrawal, he ends up shaving his face behind a door with an electric razor, before threatening two old ladies. The only difference in the movie is nobody got hurt and the situation was funny. I was hurting and this wasn’t.

I wanted this dismal experience to at least be constructive, and provide me greater empathy for folk with lasting physical disabilities, heart problems that confines them to little activity, or people whose bodies had been rotted by cancer. But honestly, it hasn’t, and anyway, most of the afflicted rightly don’t want to hear your “thoughts and prayers”, or sending them good vibes, because this won’t cure their ailments. Adverts for cancer funding are partly to blame for inculcating a culture where we expect others to offer redundant sympathy. They’re always soundtracked by cynically sentimental pop dirge, say Coldplay’s “Fix You”, to accompany pictures of people who have been demolished into husks by the ghastliest forms of contemporary chemotherapy. Most of us already know cancer’s crap, either first hand or via a friend or relative, just spare me the guilt for being lucky not to have it.

So, while I feel grateful that my injury was minor and I’m on the mend, at my stage in life the healing process becomes a more complicated dynamic. It’s a paradoxical feeling of relief, but that I’m only receiving a reprieve. Descending the stairs clumsily, at a geriatric pace, about three weeks ago, with aid of the handrail (of course), suddenly I contemplated this tawdry scenario acting as the inception to my midlife crisis. I badly wanted to ignore it like Doug Rocket did with his multiple nervous breakdowns.

This epiphany, that we’re past our prime, inevitably calls upon all of us, but the catalyst for everyone is bespoke. For some it’s their fading looks that starts the ennui; hair recedes or goes grey, it starts growing in places you wished it wouldn’t, fat starts to collect and is stubborn to shift, wrinkles appear, skin sags. Or it’s the erosion physical performance that bothers you more; your joints and muscles fatigue quicker and stiffness takes longer to shift when you wake up. As a famous Canadian dude once sang – you ache in the places you used to play.

All this I can handle. The bad ankle has given me the perspective that being pain free and mobile is what matters now, only it’s also brought me the overwhelming feeling of dread that aging is coming to take that for good and at any time. Make no mistake – waiting for this is crueller than the inevitability of death and taxes.