Along with most of my friends, I'm at the stage of life where signs of incipient mortality, the frayed threads on the carpet as it were, are starting to nip at our heels. Those outliers of decay: uncomfortable blood pressure, bunions, aches and wounds that take longer and longer to heal; there are things to endure, conditions, worries, anxieties.

I'm feeling all of them today, apart from the bunions. At least that's a solace.

Ah....the England question...at some point I have to answer that. And today might as well be the day.

Let me start with this first: I am reluctantly proud to say that I have n't watched a single kick of England's inglorious passage through the World Cup except for the slew of unavoidable re-runs of the goal against tiny Slovenia

Supporting England is being the unwilling partner in a dysfunctional relationship, with you the bewildered, unhappy supporter endures season after season of betrayal, mind-games, infidelities, narcissism, and pure rudeness. And every time, you excuse them, welcome them home and try to start over again. The one last chance.

Well, I said no to that years ago; enough is enough. England, we're finished. No more taking you back. No more simply putting up with inevitable disappointment. There's nothing else the marriage guidance people can do. Our soccer affair is over. Which is how it's been for nearly twenty years.

Sad, because I would like them to perform, properly and successfully, but until they flush out the narcissists., illiterates, egomaniacs, and general self-absorbed navel gazers, I'm not going back to them.

Furthermore, there's something else that needs to be excised, which is this: England must purge itself of this 1966 fetish. A huge psychological burden and they've been labouring under it for 44 years already. What a Calvary. When do we look forward? We're intimidated by our global football history, not inspired by it.

Baked like a Brie today. Hot weather, skirting the upper twenties which is passing for tropical here in London; hot temper, through missing a train to Doncaster by a single minute for the second month running.

Missing the first was not an accident, nor should the second be seen as a spreading pattern of my incompetence; nope, it's the unseen web of weekend engineering works with the ever-present inability of Central Line trains to stick to a timetable.

Thursday 24 June was the fifth anniversary of my blogging career. I've surprised myself.

I'm not alone...there's someone else who's found out they're wearing a Harry Potter style invisibility cloak . Companionship, finally.

Blogging always takes a back seat during the summer. It's my need to wring as much as I can out of the fine, balmy air, enjoy the leafy cool of Holland Park, and simply relax.

Today in particular, I wanted to capitalise and extend the sense of contentment I've revelled in this weekend: three glorious days in Shrewsbury, with two delicious side trips into magical Mid-Wales. Viva Aberstywth !

The Under Offer board that's stuck outside the block of flats next to mine has been there for so long, it's fused into the surroundings so completely that unless I decide I want to see it, I do n't. It's the visual equivalent of background noise.

But I did just a few minutes ago, and it's fortitude - look it's out there in all weathers, sun-bleached and wind battered like an old Pub sign - struck me hard.

I need, I really, really do, a strong dose of the same patience and simple sang-froid that board's displaying when I pull the covers back on what passes as my pay rise. Small enough that it's questionable if it's visible to the naked eye. And I don't feel happy, no not one jot.

Yanks 1, Planks 1. The usual defeat snatched from the jaws of victory routine that England excels at.

The world is turned on it's head.

Things that should n't be happening are. Not talking 2012 Maya predictions or making a millennial doomsday reference, no birds falling from the skies and ruptures appearing in the time space continuum.

No, what's prompted me to open this way was finding out to my amazement that someone I knew has high blood pressure, and he's not even thirty.

Then, to compound that, I find out that someone else I'm friendly with, who's a scant few years older than him is also on blood pressure medication.

The rhetorician in me is fighting the urge to say something on the "surely this is out of kilter with what normally occurs in human chronology"; after all high blood pressure is something I've really only associated with people in my age range - late forties and onwards - not in people who are still comparatively wet behind the ears and nappy fresh.

This must be the effects of lifestyle. The coincidence is too much to argue otherwise

It's like the evidence for climate change; it's there, it's evident, and it's inescapable. But why? Don't people want to feel healthy for as long as they can?

I can add another item in the Summer's here list that already includes spiralling barbecue smoke, occasional and almost uncontrollable bouts of hay fever, sandals and maxi dresses. The new one? Combat trousers, semi and full length. There were so many men wearing them, including me, that West London looked as if it had been taken over by paramilitaries.

And how could I omit the stalwart of any such list. Volcanic downpours. Just about to hear one kick off where I'm writing these words. First gust of driving rain against the windows already.

Reading Paul Auster always leaves me feeling curiously disengaged from life. Why is that ?

It's been one of those days when I've wanted to be at the controls of a wrecking ball and not a laptop. Lots of irritations all day long. Temper up; patience down... way down

Take that problem. Imagine it's a mirror. Smash it with something large and heavy -I know the folk taboo about broken mirrors, but stay with me here, it's a metaphor after all. Pick up the pieces, reassemble, then see how that problem looks.

Getting old is knowing...what exactly? That you're greyer ? That your hearing is shot? That Policemen and even Prime Ministers are looking so young these days ?

Or is it the sickly shock of seeing a record you remember coming out for the first time now appearing as a featured exhibit in the newly reopened Twentieth Century section of the Museum of London.

"Pretty Vacant", who'd thought in the pressing factory in 1977 that this would be eventually nestling in a display cabinet radiating uncomfortable electricity without even being played.

Hard to decide which hurts most: the dark clouds appearing on the horizon, or the toothache I've had all day. Results of instant one man poll: toothache.

From morn till noon, then from noon till dusk, I've done just one thing: sat outside in this mesmerising spell of hot weather.

Already restored, refreshed, and relaxed from five stupendous days of wandering Scottish sea cliffs, wallowing in balmy, salty, tangy sea air, stunned by ice-blue (but not cold), cloudless skies, and now two days of this lush, semi-tropical marinade we're having in London.

It's difficult to find something as elementally restorative as a fine day, and I've been blessed with seven.

Five revelatory, warm weather days in Scotland. Why revelatory ? Simple. The Far North is dauntingly beautiful, hard to reach, but worth every step, pulsing with great bird-life. You could turn off my hearing, blindfold me, but I'd still be able to sense where the guillemots and fulmars roost: the stink.

Now for the dentist to sort out this throbbing tooth.

"I live like a plant, filling myself with the sun and light, with colours, and fresh air" said Flaubert in one of his letters from Egypt. Good enough rubric for a lot of people to follow.

As much as I'd like a Labour Government, I'd rather they were in opposition, watching the Tories run themselves aground.

The notion of a Lib / Lab pact buoyed up by a variety of smaller parties is too shaky for me, and it's open to the most egregious whinging from the Right wing media. Nor does it taste...well... particularly democratic either; the party that gets 2 million votes fewer than the party who won, remain in power with an as yet to be decided new leader, who in turn is elected by party members, rather than the general populace. Too strange, too dangerous. Very Stalinist in that respect with a twist of the Florida 2000 debacle. This could create an unbridgeable social \ regional schism. Don't like it at all

Two things are on my mind this evening. Who will be the first senior Tory to resign - once they've eventually they've ground out how they'll run the country, either in a coalition, or as a go it alone minority that is - will it be Hague, Osborne, Boris, or someone completely unknown to us? Because as eggs are surely eggs, scandal follows the Tories like a bad smell.

That's the first thing. Next up is this: what will be the first conspiracy theory the Daily Mail will batten on to to excuse the Tories less than stellar electoral performance?

Think I've already spotted a possible candidate; the Sunday Times quoted a piece of instant research stating that a mere 16,000 votes in those hotly contested marginal seats stood between Davy boy's hoped for sweeping ascendancy into No 10 and the muddle he's actually in.

Now, remembering that hundreds of people could n't get in to some polling stations because the lines were so long, and knowing that the Daily Mail never lets reality step between them and breast beating scandal, and they certainly never let that inconvenience them when it comes to cooking up a conspiracy, then I see this happening: the Mail's frothing columnists will start insinuating that it was actually local government blundering that robbed Davy.

The fact that many of those rightly aggrieved blocked voters may well have been there to mark a big X for another party, or in constituencies that were n't wafer thin battlegrounds will matter not one whit to the Mailsters.

Fascinating to think what might come out of the talks "Rupert" Cameron is having with Nick Clegg. It could augur very badly for the Tories in the long term.

It's the collision of two opposing forces: Tories loath the very idea of Europe, similarly the notion of PR sticks in their mouth with the same fear as someone about to be water-boarded. These two being the very bedrock of Liberalism.

But Cameron is as desperate as his coven of supporters are to feel the keys to No 10 jangling in his trouser pocket.

If I were Nick Clegg, then with the cards I've got in my hand, and don't forget, he's probably being quietly courted by Labour, then I'd play like this: Cameron can be PM, but Vince Cable gets the Chancellor's job and give me (Nick) the role of Foreign Secretary. A two man dream team.

Just the thought of someone who can actually speak a language other than English as Foreign Secretary, in place of the hideous character from Yorkshire who's in it and delights in ridiculous alliances with shadowy Eastern European crypto-fascists. Imagine.

I can also see a Cons / Lib Dem coalition being the first toll of the tocsin for the Tory party as it exists now; the Thatcherite hard-right will depart in a huff for the weirder right-wing fringes - UKIP basically, leaving a (I'm hoping I know, but sometimes you have to float the optimist ship in the shallowest water) a softer, gentler Tory residual who may just start to see the sense of liberal democratic ideals and principles.