30 going on 60

My back hurts. This cough has been getting on my nerves - and everybody else’s - for six months, on and off. Even my hands look a decade or two beyond their years, wrinkly and veiny as they are. I’m 30, but there will be people double - and probably triple - my age who will consider themselves healthier than me. Where did it all go wrong, eh?

I think I can pinpoint where the downfall started. From the age of 16, I worked at Marks & Spencer as a Saturday boy. I was diligent, helpful and pretty damn good at running the bakery (apart from the time I nearly burnt the place down, but this is neither the time nor the place), but there’s one thing I failed at - lifting all those crates and pallets in the correct manner. I wasn’t alone. How silly we’d all have felt, squatting and lifting every time; just asking for trouser splits and unwanted breaks of wind (and that’s just the girls). Not to mention that everything would have taken three times as long. So instead, I bent my back over every time, and now I’m paying the price, and have done ever since my late teens.

My mates have always found my bad back a source of merriment. Many a night out has featured one or more of my friends nearly wetting themselves as I writhe around in pain. And at times like today, when I am beset by cough and cold, one false move could result in a whole world of pain.Earlier this week, I went for a big cough, to really clear my system. Big mistake. I’ve not been able to stand up straight since, instead walking around like a hunchback. It reminds me of two Christmases ago when a similarly forceful cough resulted in me being laid up for two days; on the third day, my wife helped me around John Lewis as we perused alarm clocks. A great day.

As well as the back pain, it’s the cough and the cold doing for me at the moment. I’ve just enjoyed a hot honey and lemon drink made for me by my boss, and tonight, I’ll go home (which, post-selling and pre-buying a house, is with mum and dad), and listen to the mocking remarks of my parents. They’re right of course; without wishing ill on them, surely I should be the healthiest of the three of us.Maybe I should go and see a doctor, especially given how long this cough has been going on. After all, the ads say you should go after a few weeks of a cough. But last time I went, after two months, they all but laughed me out the door. It’s OK – not like I pay my taxes or anything. So I’m stuck Covonia (or as the infinitely annoying Ainsley Harriott would say, Covoooooonia) and other such over the counter ‘remedies’, which are, in a word, useless.

Apparently, feeling (or looking) old before my years isn’t new. Back at M&S, one break time, me and a group of Christmas temps got into guessing each other’s ages (oh, how the hours just flew by). I was 17 at the time, but deemed by my peers to be in my early thirties. It was probably the unkempt facial hair that did that, but one might call it prophetic; a sign of things to come.OK, so there’s an element of tongue-in-cheek about this. I might be over-dramatising slightly, but a part of me does genuinely worry about what I will be like in 30 years time. Or even ten. What if I have kids, and I can’t play with them, having to watch from the sidelines instead?

For now, I do at least have my hair, and lots of it too. Not a grey in sight either. But with the men in my family having thick hair that goes grey from an early age, I’d better get the Just For Men in.