How a fountain pen and a chiropractor restored my lost youth

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.