Global Warning | 17 January 2009

My wife tells me, and so it must be right, that now that we are retired we must beware of the involution of our habits and interests. It is all too easy for old people to live the petty round, in which a visit to the grocer seems an expedition of some magnitude, and not to change their clothes for weeks on end.

And yet there is something deeply reassuring about the scale of the quotidian, that seems suddenly upon retirement to be so much more important than it seemed before: besides, one cannot always be considering the deepest questions of existence, and not being a cosmologist or an astronomer, the vastness and coldness of the universe frightens me.

I was in a café the other day when two academics, a man and a woman, sat at the table next to me. They started off talking about their important academic research in Moscow, but then they got on to the problem that really exercised them: whether one should score Brussels sprouts in their base before cooking them.