To be, or not to be, a Viking …

I had a go with an app, yesterday, which shows what you would’ve looked like as a Viking. I uploaded a photo to it, taken in the park last September, and within minutes it had popped up an image of me with long thick plaits and deep brown un-spectacled eyes, but otherwise (in my opinion) looking much as I once did back in my twenties.

Looking at it, I guess that ‘Viking Me’ would be in her twenties, too - the prime of her life. Google tells me that 35% of women in Viking England didn't survive beyond thirty years of age, with thirty-one to forty-year-olds considered middle-aged and anyone over fifty classed as old. At my age – sixty - I would probably have been dead.

Quite interesting, when you consider the British government now expect me to work until I'm sixty-seven!

I ran out of blood pressure tablets on New Year's Eve, so discombobulated by Christmas and trying to remember which day each day of the in-between week actually was that the fact I was on the last packet escaped my notice. So I ordered a new prescription online, and popped in to the chemist yesterday and again today to see whether, against the odds, it had been actioned.

It was, ‘Nothing's come through, yet,’ yesterday, but, thankfully, a ‘Yes’ today. I've never worried about not taking them on the odd day here and there before but hadn't felt a hundred percent on my walk into town earlier, and after my elder brother’s heart attack a few weeks ago, have begun to worry the medication’s more vital to keeping me alive than I'd previously assumed. Indeed, it could well be the reason I've even made it to the age of sixty, when my Viking ancestor-esses generally didn't.

So I was grateful when the assistant said, ‘yes, they’re here!’, adding, ‘do you pay for your prescriptions?’
‘No,’ I beamed, ‘I'm sixty!’, the fact that I get them for free a relatively new and pleasant experience, and still something of a surprise, given my retirement age having been extended.
 
‘My apologies,’ she said, and ‘no problem,’ I replied cheerfully, and I left the shop with a big smile on my face. Because while I may not look like a twenty-year-old Viking warrioress, it's good to know I don't look like a twenty-first century old crone, yet, either!

Alison Mott

Image created by app on gagdonkey.net