Click!

Some men in masks board an underground train. A woman is tracking them. They carry identical attache cases. Are they suicide bombers? They catch sight of her. She punches the alarm. All hell breaks loose.

And my mother switches the TV off.

As I expected she would. Anything too fruity; click. Anything unfamiliar: click. Her remote, her rules.

"I don't know what that was," she says in an affronted tone.

"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D" I say.

"How on earth do you know?"

"Because they just told us."

We've had variants on this conversation many times before. Only now there's a difference. It's not that she won't pay attention, it's that she can't.

I find it hard to accept that we've crossed that line.

Frostie

The BBC ran a tribute to David Frost last night.

I witnessed the full arc of his career-  from That Was The Week That Was, through Frost/Nixon to Through The Keyhole. I even watched him sometimes.  I remember him as an acerbic young dude, as a jet-setting playboy (married briefly to Peter Sellers' widow), as the elder statesman of British TV.

Makes me feel like Old Father Time.