Andrew Dubber     

They reckon is 30 is new 18. And 40 is the new 25. Something is the new black, but I can’t remember what it is. Stripes maybe.

My father turned 70 years old today. He reckons 70 is the new 30. He neither looks nor, he says, feels anywhere close to 70. Three-score years and ten used to be your lot – but I think we can pretty much dispense with that idea. Dad’s just getting started again.

Chick Dubber (christened Charles, after his father – but nobody calls him that) spent the vast majority of his working life in the print industry. He’s a typesetter by trade and started back when that meant actually setting type – moving lead blocks with backwards letters in them into print trays. By the time he retired, he was running Quark on a Mac.

In his retirement, he’s stopped putting other people’s words onto the page, and has started using his own. He’s taken a couple of creative writing courses and is already a published short story writer. He’s currently working on his first novel.

The cool thing is that he’s really good at it. He sends his stories to me and my sisters to read through and make suggestions, and they’re always really good. Likeable characters, slices of real life, but always with a twist at the end that makes you smile, feel for the characters, or sometimes laugh out loud.

Here’s one he put up on his blog last year: The Phone Call

Dad keeps pretty active. He’s either at golf or tennis every other day. He cycles and cooks. He plays bridge. He hangs out with his older brother Fred, who lives just round the corner, and they often go to visit their mother.

Dad doesn’t blog as often as most of us would like (though the fact that he blogs at all sets him apart from many of his contemporaries), but part of that had to do with the fact that his laptop died. I’ve bought him a second hand Mac Mini for his birthday to rectify that, and he’s getting a screen to go with it from Mum and my sisters. Hopefully there’ll be more regular posts on http://chickdubber.com in future.

So – happy birthday Dad – congratulations on the milestone, sorry I’m not in the same country for this one… but I promise to come to your 80th. It’s the new 40, you know.

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