God, it’s a bore getting older: all those things you used to be able to do but can’t any more and will never be able to do again. Grow hair, for example (except in all the wrong places); recover quickly from hangovers; vault fences; climb high up trees without getting vertigo; be looked at with anything more than indifference or disgust by attractive young females; and so on.
But it’s not all bad. Sometimes you can buck the trend. A few months ago, my friend David Hearsey — who flew Halifax bombers in the war — emailed to tell me that he’d recently taken up flying again. How amazingly impressive is that in your late eighties/early nineties? Neither of the two things I’m about to tell you can compete with David’s magical recovery of his lost youth but they do, I think, in their teeny tiny way, offer a small glimmer of hope for those of us the wrong side of 40.
The first concerns my recent rediscovery of writing by hand. I’d virtually given up — and with very good reason. So crabbed and spavined had my writing grown that I was almost embarrassed to let anyone read it. It looked like a subliterate child’s. Also, I found the physical process of writing arduous and uncomfortable. All this I put down to lack of practice resulting from excessive keyboard use. But it wasn’t that, at all, I discovered — quite by accident — when I popped into a stationery shop to buy Boy a fountain pen for his new school.
On the spur of the moment I bought myself one too. It’s a Lamy — a brand which I don’t think existed in Britain when I was Boy’s age (in my day the big rivals, inspiring much marque snobbery and fanatical brand loyalty, were Sheaffer and Parker) — and I think it might be the best 15 quid I’ve ever spent.
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