Long life | 26 May 2016

When your mind suddenly goes wonky, you may be the one person who doesn’t realise that there is something wrong with it. That’s what happened a month ago when I was on a country holiday in Tuscany with my wife. It was lovely weather, and lunch had been laid out of doors. I had cooked a sea bass and was feeling rather pleased with myself. We were both happy, and things could hardly have been better. But everything began to go wrong when my wife decided to ask if I could pass her a knife. A knife? I didn’t know what a knife was. I had never heard of such a thing. I was damned if I was going to respond to this strange request, however much she persisted with it. Yet persist she did, even to the extreme of writing ‘knife’ on a piece of paper to emphasise her point.