British television presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lived a remarkably actioned packed lifestyle despite the fact he spends a lot of his time either behind the wheel or in front of a desk.
In his time travelling the world for Top Gear and The Grand Tour, he’s driven through blizzards in the Arctic, crossed the Sahara at the peak of the day, waded through mosquito-infested swamps, and almost been hit with a machete by his co-host James May.
In recent years, he’s even taken up farming as a part of the show Clarkson’s Farm. While not usually the host who suffers from health issues (that honour goes to Richard Hammond), Clarkson has recently revealed that his age has well and truly caught up to him.
In a recent column for The Sunday Times, Clarkson was candid about the general decline of his health over the years.
“Most of my body doesn’t really work any more,” Clarkson revealed.
While that statement is somewhat hyperbolic befitting Clarkson’s usual style, he is still speaking the truth. He has about as many problems as one can have and still does the job that he’s been doing for the better part of twenty years now.
Clarkson first revealed that he is now very farsighted.
“I can still read not just a number plate from 75 yards away, but also who made the screws that were used to attach it to the car. This, of course, is great. Except it isn’t, because from a range of three feet I couldn’t even make out a tabloid newspaper’s page 1 headline. ‘Freddie who ate your what!!?'” he said.
This understandably has affected his ability to drive.
“This makes driving tricky. Yes, I can spot ants crossing the road from four postcodes away, but I need my spectacles to see how fast I’m going. So where did I put them?” he continued.
Clarkson then detailed how his general memory has declined as well. He has reportedly spent ten minutes looking around for his glasses so he can drive before realising they were on his head the entire time.
Like many people in their older years, Clarkson is also not as mobile as he used to be. He can now no longer crossover over a waist-high fence
Above all else, however, it’s his hearing that troubles him the most. He has trouble hearing certain frequencies and parts of speech. Certain sentences are perfectly intelligible but others need to be repeated to him.
“If you were to stand at the bottom of my garden and whisper: ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’, I’d be there in a jiffy. But if you stood right next to me and asked me to empty the dishwasher, I’d just get a Garfunkelly sound of silence,” he explained.
Clarkson has had progressive hearing loss for the past twelve years and it has gotten to the point where his chances of developing dementia have increased. This is a common side effect of untreated hearing loss that many people are still unaware of.
“The upshot is that by the time you read this, I will be using hearing aids. They’re very snazzy and extremely clever,” he said.
Clarkson then details how he plans to program them to filter out the word ‘dishwasher’ so he is never asked to empty it again. At the very least, Clarkson’s sense of humor is still as sharp as it has ever been.