Do you sometimes look down at your body and think: ‘Which bit of you is going to let me down?’ For most of us, there’s a part of our body which fill finish us off. Perhaps the signs are already there if anyone bothered to look really closely – maybe right now there’s a little indicator that all is not as it should be with your bowels, that there’s a strange growth in your pancreas, that the prostate is swelling or that the heart is struggling just a fraction. It’s nothing for the time being, but in the coming decades things will get worse, and you’ll develop both an intimate knowledge of the particular ailing body part that’s plaguing you, and an amazement that you never quite appreciated the trouble-free functioning of that organ during your earlier life. Maybe you’re currently in total ignorance of the existence of what will eventually turn out to be the cause of the end of your existence on earth.

We can never truly appreciate things until they are gone. So, although we can try be conscious about the fact that running and jumping and swimming are far from the most ordinary and every day activities, in a short time, we will dream of such care-free movement. I praise my Creator for being fearfully and wonderfully made, and I’ll try and make the most of it while I can. What people twice my age would give just to kick a football around as I can now.