An infallible law maintains that as you grow older certain treats of your younger years become the scourges of your autumnal self. Christmas gradually transforms from a present-laden period of grace to a dread feast where you buy the presents and don’t receive them. You avoid Birthdays which, once awaited with glee, are now another digit on an already listing abacus. This disgreeable graph would plot a distasteful big dipper; as age grows pleasure diminishes.
But might it be that the horrors of our greener years are metamorphised into delectation as we advance towards decrepitude? Sprouts I didn’t like but are now at least a mild source of satisfaction; the notion of boredom changes its complexion these days, an empty day being the ideal to which I most aspire; as things stand I must admit to liking cooking, washing-up, even ironing (if we can omit the business of getting the ironing board out of the cupboard). The pleasures of silence (increasingly difficult to find) have become an absolute, while many years ago, in the long days of childhood, it would have been an absolute purgatory. This graph, then, has its consolations. I look longingly back to the Christmases of old but eagerly forward to the washing-up awaiting me in tomorrow’s kitchen sink.

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