I was never very tall. At my peak, I reached five feet eight and a half inches. The half was important. When you are under five feet nine, you don’t casually discard half-inches.
Five feet eight and a half used to be considered a respectable, medium height for a man. I could walk into a room without anyone thinking, “That man is unusually small.” Nowadays, I pass teenagers in school uniforms who tower above me like young redwoods. They look about fourteen and already have to duck under road signs.
My real problem, however, was never height. It was leg length.
One of my dear aunties, who was similarly constructed, used to say, “If God had given me legs, I’d be a big woman.”
I knew exactly what she meant. God had apparently been measuring us up, reached the legs and discovered He was running short of material.
I have spent most of my adult life searching clothes shops for trousers with a 32-inch waist and a 30-inch leg. Even that was optimistic. A 29-inch leg was better, but shops rarely stocked it. Trouser manufacturers seemed to believe that any man with a 32-inch waist must also have the legs of a racehorse.
Buying trousers usually involved finding the correct waist and then losing the lower six inches in folds around my shoes. I could either have them altered or pull them up until the waistband was just below my chest. This gave me the appearance of a man whose trousers were slowly trying to swallow him.
There was a period when my waist expanded to 34 inches. Then, for one brief and regrettable chapter, it reached 36. I blamed the sizing, the washing machine, the time of day and whichever meal I had just eaten. I blamed everything except food.
Eventually, through restraint, exercise and the heroic decision not to eat every biscuit I saw, I restored my waist to a more respectable size. I was feeling rather pleased with myself until a recent hospital visit.
The nurse asked me to stand against the height measure.
“Five feet seven,” she announced.
“There must be some mistake,” I said.
She checked again.
“No. Five feet seven.”
“But I was five feet eight and a half.”
She gave me the sympathetic look medical professionals reserve for older men disputing official measurements.
“It happens to us all,” she said.
Apparently, ageing makes us shrink. Nobody warns you about this. You expect grey hair, wrinkles, poor hearing and the occasional need to stand up slowly, but you don’t expect parts of you to quietly disappear.
I had spent years reducing my waist only to discover that I was now being reduced from the top.
At this rate, I may finally achieve the perfect height-to-waist ratio, but only because I’ll be roughly square.
It also made me think about the Bible stories of my childhood. Methuselah, we were told, lived to the age of 969. As a child, I accepted this without question. Adults said many strange things in those days, and we had no Google to challenge them.
But if Methuselah started shrinking in old age at the same rate as the rest of us, he must have been about a foot tall by the end.
Perhaps that is why we hear so little about his later years. By the age of 800, his family were probably keeping him on the mantelpiece between two ornaments.
And I bet even then he couldn’t find trousers with a short enough leg.
