Threescore Years and Ten

My name is Jane. On my next birthday, near the beginning of 2025, I will be seventy years old. I'm the one on the right in the picture, meeting Moomintroll in Covent Garden.

The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone and we fly away. [Psalm 90 verse 10]

I've known that Bible verse since I was young. The older English I learned said: The days of our years are threescore and ten... which is more poetic, but the meaning is the same - a score is twenty years.

Whichever way you look at it, I know I have fewer days in front of me than I have behind me, and I want to live them well. Not focusing on the toil and trouble that comes with old age but taking a positive approach, finding out what I can do, and living each day to the full.

For the year ahead I have set myself a challenge: to try to do seventy things I have never tried before. So far, my list of possible things is far short of 70. It would be helpful to have suggestions for what I might try. The plan is to record my progress in this blog.

I have done ONE new thing - setting up this web log (learning where the word "blog" comes from) and posting this. Success is far from guaranteed, but, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive."