‘Develop your eccentricities while you are young,’ said David Ogilvy. ‘That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going gaga.’
I am 46. And I am happily beginning to discover that a lot of habits I once thought ‘geriatric’ are in fact common sense. I haven’t yet started wearing beige or buying shoes that close with Velcro, but I’m tempted. And last week I gave in to one urge and went around the house compulsively labelling things.
I haven’t reached the point where my remote controls and radios have little torn shreds of sticky paper attached to them with hand-drawn arrows labelling buttons ‘video’, ‘Radio 4’ and ‘off’. But I have started labelling all our bloody chargers. As a family, we travel with about 14 of these, in different sizes, and they were beginning to drive me insane.
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