Home Front

1. Ailz: Remember how you said you'd done all the jobs last night?

Self: Yes.

Ailz: Well you had- so long as you don't count closing the shutter, running the dishwasher and locking the back door....

Self: Ah.....

2. My new phone got delivered to a neighbouring property. This happens every so often. And their stuff gets delivered here. Both houses have three syllabled names- with two of the syllables being the same. It has me wondering whether we should rename our place. The Chestnuts has a nicely suburban ring to it. Or how about Horse Dump Farm? I'll bet there aren't any neighbouring properties that could be confused with that.

It's not as though the existing names are deeply ancestral. I've looked for them on 19th century maps and they're not there. At some time in the past 150 years an element crept into several local place names that's suggestive of a royal connection- and it's entirely bogus.

Observing The Process

"Getting old is a bore" I thought

And then I thought, "No it isn't because the process is so interesting."

I'm an observer. I like observing things. For instance how the aches get achier and the afternoon naps get longer.

I'm not the man I was a year ago. I realised this when I was slogging up a valley side in Ashdown Forest with the kids last month and wasn't sure I could make it to the top.

Early summer was pretty lively. Lots of family action, lots of driving about. It flattened me.

"How is one supposed to feel at 68?" I keep asking myself. "Depends on who you are," I reply. "If you're Mick Jagger you still feel like you're 25. If you're Steve Jobs you've been dead for over a decade."

And then there's the bonus of wisdom (pompous word but it's inescapable.) As a young man, even as a middle-aged man, I was full of fear. As an old man I'm not.