Rudy: 'Worms! I just 8-1! Hahaha!'

Eagle-eyed readers may notice there's no picture credit this week - which means I must have dusted down the long-neglected camera, exercised the shutter and experimented with aperture openings. That's what spring does to us - the excitement sends us ker-razy. Just ask the Robin, nicknamed Rudy by my housemate, who does not shut up when the sun shines upon his teeny weeny worm-accommodating beak.

But this blog ain't about Rudy. He is a metaphor, you see, albeit a slightly tenuous one. Allow me to explain. Rudy is a Robin, right? So far, so good. And he's singing, yeah? Like football fans do, normally when they're having fun and not at the windswept Kassam Stadium in January chewing on an icy conglomeration of beefy entrails. The Robins, it just so happens, is the nickname of the football team I love - Cheltenham Town (which, if you're one of my longer-term followers, you know already). Only the Saturday before last, us Cheltenham fans weren't singing. We had lost 8-1 to Crewe Alexandra.

A blissful naivety shattered

Cast your mind back a few thousand moons to when you were a kid - some family event (celebrating a sibling getting their 100-metre swimming badge, the arrival of a puppy, the laying of a new patio etc) was coming to an end, and it was time to kiss Great Aunty Ethel goodbye. This was about as enthralling as jaundice - but compelled by politeness (and pity), that peck on the aged cheek would always be delivered, albeit with stuttering hesitancy and an unwavering but just-about-conquerable reluctance.

When you're that young, old age and its inescapable physical reminders seem as far away as a £150 two-week package deal to Proxima Centauri. This blissful naivety continues for approximately 15 years until, as I discovered last weekend, it ends as suddenly and unexpectedly as the movement of a bowel tasked with removing days-old seafood.