Some Ages of Man

This Far Place is now in temporary residence in its Malaysian home after a comfortable journey north with Fi Fi & Fa Fa in attendance. They are watching High School Musical 2 on DVD, borrowed from Khalsom. It seems this is the in thing amongst the pre-pubescent throughout the world. They tell us that, among the cognoscenti, it is known as HSM and is the chief subject of conversation in school, hence the desperate need to watch it, learn the songs, practise the dance routines, and so forth. I seem to remember childhood as a much simpler thing. I pointed out to Fi Fi that one day in the future (God willing) I’ll be teasing her about HSM as I now tease her about her days of Barneydom (a time when she’ll realise how ultra-hip my tastes in music are and be begging to borrow my CDs.) She sniffed and declared she would be loyal to HSM for life. That’s a long time.

And, talking of long times, it was good to meet Val & Peter after almost twenty years. Almost all the news of old friends and colleagues was positive (no deaths or grave illnesses) and Peter himself was looking extremely well (see evidence above) having come through his own encounter with cancer with a clean bill of health. Their children are no longer children – though, of course, they remain stubbornly so in my mind despite having children of their own and one having fought in the first Gulf War and the other being an Inspector for the police.

I have a theory concerning age that we are actually a mixture of ages inside with one age usually dominating as a sort of default position. I know that bits of me are distinctly five or six and other bits around seventy, and that this has always been the case, and I’ve observed something similar in most of the people I know well. It's interesting to figure out the default age of certain writers: Dickens is pretty obviously seven years old; Henry James around fifty. I’ve teaching one student at the moment who is strikingly middle-aged. My own basic age is a painfully callow sixteen.