Riggers · outside the ring, Amsterdam
I started at fifty two and I would rather not be congratulated
Pinned as started_at_fifty_two
- Wants
- a partnership with somebody who is neither impressed nor assuming
- Rope so far
- Two years exactly, and more practice than most people I know.
- Around
- outside the ring, Amsterdam
Two years in, at fifty four, and the compliments have become the most tiring part of it. People tell me it is wonderful that I started. They say it warmly and they mean it, and each time it puts me back in the position of being a remarkable beginner rather than a man who has been doing something steadily for two years.
Outside the ring, two years, and I practise more than most people I know because I have the hours. My work finishes at a fixed time, my children are adults with flats of their own, and my evenings are genuinely mine for the first time since I was young.
What I would like is a partnership with somebody who takes me as I am, which means both not being impressed and not assuming I know things that I do not. Two years is two years. It is not nothing and it is not fifteen. I would also like to stop being asked what made me begin, which I have now answered so often that the answer has gone smooth and stopped being entirely true.
One person, over years, a standing evening or two, and a relationship with a Sunday in it as well as a Thursday.
What will not work: anybody who finds a man of my age doing this either charming or unlikely; being shown things by somebody twenty years younger with a kind manner, which happens and is well meant; anything occasional.