Fifty? And other pauses for thought...

I haven't been blogging much of late but I can't let this pass: Kylie Minogue turned 50 on Monday.

I'll just that let sink in. It doesn't seem possible, does it? Mainly because if you're about my age, i.e. you were at secondary school in the era of peak Neighbours, you probably feel, as I do, that you've sort of grown up with Kylie. Okay, so she's wearing better than most of us, and has achieved more than most of us too, but you get what I'm saying, right? And so to acknowledge that she, the perennial sweetheart, the eternal fantasy girl next door, is not just a woman but a middle-aged woman now embarking on her sixth decade, well, that is also to acknowledge that we (by which I mean I) am getting old too.

Time is short, and I've wasted a lot of it lately, not least on lazy blog posts (a bit like this one) that amounted to little more than a couple of trite paragraphs and a YouTube embed. Yet at the same time, I would tell anyone who cared to ask (and ask they still do, though decreasingly) that my fiction writing would be going great guns if only I had more time. Hence a bit of a rethink all round at New Amusements Towers... time to get busy livin'. And, for what it's worth, I have been writing, these past few weeks.

But back to Kylie. I'm no great fan of her music, aside from one or two tracks, and am fairly ambivalent about her acting, I've just always been a fan of her. At various times in my life she has been a poster on my wall (this one, seemingly now quite rare), an early mobile phone wallpaper (this pic), and a memorable gig in a now sadly defunct venue, tickets bought by an ex who got tired of me referring to Kylie as "the future wife". The ex is long, long gone... but Kylie, she's always been around. And now she's 50 and promoting an album that I won't buy called Golden (presumably because that's what a 50th anniversary is). As ever, I found the singles to be inoffensive but not something I would choose to listen to, ordinarily. But then, one evening, I heard Jo Whiley play this album track, and I rather liked it. You might too.

And check out the changes with this GIFfy Instagram post which, if nothing else, keeps the blog ticking over...