Before we get started, I would like to clear up any misapprehensions concerning the title.  Much as I love Australia and assorted rellies therein, this is not a timely warning about getting up in the loft and wrapping bandages round your pipes, on the off-chance of snow. The planet is fractious, no doubt of that.  It got used to a sky full of polluting aeroplanes and rivers disgorging rubbish into the sea and then we went into lockdown and stopped.  It’s like living on sweets and chocolates and then going on a health doodah, featuring mainly water, your skin will react.  Oh yes, I speak as a person with troublesome intestines, who has lost nearly a stone and gained a zit the size of Cornwall.

But it’s not about that, you’ll be relieved to know.

It’s about catching up. It isn’t an age thing, I’ve done it forever.  It’s fashion, diet, prevailing trends, in which I’m always playing catch up.  The reason we are always playing catch up is the global nature of everything on the planet and commerce.  In the sixteenth century you could be a wit in your own village and world famous as far as you were concerned, especially if you never embarked upon the arduous journey to the next village.  What with sowing enough seed to have extra crops so you could sell some to hire a donkey and a pair of shoes, most people never bothered. Like some mediaeval Amazon, peddlers visited, sometimes as often as once a year. To make up for the deficiency, if you had a really massive village, as many as, say, five cottages, there might be several peddlers a year.  They weren’t all fashionistas, though the original haberdasher was a seller of clothing for men.  In a cod piece you never had to worry if you dressed left or right, you dressed up, which makes some of our shocking fashions seem a bit on the tame side.  If you were a village woman a few hundred years ago, you’d be waiting for the chapman to call.  He was an itinerant peddler possibly peddling the ribbons from the narrow weaver, or the stuff to tie all your clothes together, the cord made by the braider.  If you were peckish you’d be hoping for an itinerant kedger, or fisherman, from whom we get kedgeree, which was the one complete dish I could eat in small amounts a couple of years ago, so I’d have been glad to see him.  Less so for the duffer, a peddler of very cheap goods; the borler, who made cheap clothing and the raffman, who dealt in saleable rubbish.

They are, of course, all online now and it’s only a few hundred years since newspapers were invented here, in coffee houses, people not wishing to talk to each other early in the AM even then.  Instantly influencers were on it like a cart bonnet:  buyeth thy panniers, full hoops are so last century! Which must have been a blow to tranqueters everywhere.  These makers of hoops may well have been sunk in gloom, ready to shuffle off their metal coils, not realising they only had to wait a century or so for the crinoline, or another century after that for the hula hoop.  Never give up; in fashion what goes around comes around, eventually.

Which brings me back to the seasonal lagging.  I have it, badly.  It’s not just online influencers telling me purple eyebrows are so last week, it’s a lack of enthusiasm on my part.  I think my desire to look forward in time was depleted by years of writing for magazines, ahead of time.  Six months ahead, mostly.  This is the reason we have Christmas in July on all the shopping channels; they’ve just finished making ten tonnes of fake snow and are bursting to flog it, or have taken delivery of six containers of fairy lights and only have a corner of the warehouse to cram them all into.  Not that I am saying all such televisual peregrinators are raffmen and I do recall sitting in the garden writing a magazine pantomime in a heatwave and wondering if anyone would want it.  When the festivities commenced, six months hence, I was lauded as being on the ball, in the spirit and generally up to speed, though I never had time to bask in the comments, I was too busy inventing beach umbrellas and dressing dolls in bikinis as the snow fell.

These days I just lack enthusiasm because of age. I have retired friends who wonder every year if it’s worth taking the Christmas decorations down.  They are not alone, there’s a plethora of raffmen online who will sell you exactly the same strings of fairy lights for barbeques that they were selling for the tree a while ago.  In fact, it’s the same picture, with a different caption.  It’s always barbeque season somewhere.

I also lack enthusiasm because of weather patterns and changeability.  When I taught at the language college everyone’s favourite witticism, that translated readily and that you could say in class, was that Britain has a lovely climate and dreadful weather.  That really is the reason I am lukewarm and the heating is on.  I can’t buy sleeveless tops in May, it’s just too optimistic.  Thin pyjamas with tiny shorts in April?  I’m not even going to try them on.  But here we are in July and not only do I quite fancy a sleeveless top, the duffers are selling them for next to nothing because they are bursting to fill the chapman’s tray with winter coats.  The other advantage to me is that recently purchased items do not lurk in a bag in a cupboard so that I am discovering a pair of bagged shorts in a clear-out in January.  I retrieve the item from the drive where the delivery peregrinator has chucked it, disinfect the mailbag, don my gloves, get the tongs, open the bag and wear the item in three days, just like that!

There is also the surprise discovery that, as you get older, despite having more relatives than you used to have, you get pickier.  You realise a preference for quality, which, coupled with the knowledge that Raffmen make clothing on the small size to save costs, so that anyone over fifty needs to go up about three sizes to have a chance of even getting a forearm into the trouser leg and waving without breaking their fingers.  Better quality clothing lasts longer; if you still own six really good tee-shirts bought in a sale, why would you want a seventh from the duffer?  Besides which I know I wear the stuff I have and don’t want to end up like Sam Pepys.

The honest (because he wrote in code and didn’t think anyone would read it) diarist bangs on for weeks about a suit trimmed with sliver lace, which he is having made.  There is one very like the description in the clothing museum in Bath. On and on he goes about how he is going to put one over his friends, how very jealous they will be, how extremely keen the cognoscenti will be to be introduced to the man in the silver suit and so on.  By the time he takes delivery of the suit we are all bored to tears. He tries it on, walks up and down his bedroom in it and asks the opinion of the wife, which turns out to be that’s it’s a bit OTT and will make her look dowdy.

He never wore it out.  It possibly turned into his gardening suit, or maybe was donated to a peregrinator, who would not be able to beg in it, not even for cold kedgeree.

There are advantages to lagging.  Not buying the item du jour, only to find by the time it gets delivered it is so last week.

I would like you to remember this, next time you go cruising up the Big River retailer and other places late at night when you are tired. I will endeavour to remember it too and, even, not act upon it! The raffmen now have ethereal container ships, on which they sit with the tills open, twenty-four seven, while we do the peregrinating.

Fashion is the same as it always was; a load of hoopla and tranqueters.  I would sing Anything Goes if I didn’t know that a Col Porteur is a travelling bible salesman.  Which proves there is nothing new under the sun, therefore it’s always better to lag.

Stay on top!  Be behind! Back on out, the lagging is lovely!

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What’s your number?  This is not the same as a chosen ‘lucky’ number.  For years I thought mine was seven and incorporated it in anything, such as lottery numbers, that I felt needed some help from a number that belonged to me and half the world.  My mother, back in the Sixties, flower arranging, came home from one seminal class and announced that flowers were utterly unbearable unless they were arranged in fives or threes.  No one was brave enough to suggest tens or sixes, or, good grief, eighteens or thirties.  Thirty flowers, are you insane?  I am sure you have followed the dictates of the planting police, even if sane with certificates to prove it, and buried your flowering bulbs in odd numbers.

Allowing for all these stringent mathematical considerations, it took me some time, a lifetime so far, to realise my number is two. Things in my life happen in twos.  Having jumped to this conclusion at glacial speed, I have now started putting plant pots on the drive in twos. One big ‘un, one little ‘un, and I have to say, feel very much better for it.

So I was not surprised last week when two cases of mistaken identity followed hot on each other’s heels.  They felt exactly right, given that they were very exactly wrong.

The first happened to me.  I had a dentist’s appointment, planned for months, which at the last minute had to be given over to ascertaining whether the tooth that was so painful I was quite ready to apply the pliers and pull, was abscessed or just the result of grinding due to the usual family difficulties.  An X-Ray having proved the latter, as I was in the next big town with a large clothing Marks and Spencer available and my parking ticket a two hour one, in case of dental awfulness, I headed cheerfully on foot up the main street.  I was after pyjamas; having lost half a stone, mine were actually dropping off my lower half every time I stood up, which can prove quite tricky with the postman early in the AM.  Having purchased two pairs of pyjama shorts and pushed the boat out to include two tops, all in one size smaller than inhabited in the previous twenty years, (this is swanking, but true), I headed back down the street, on my way passing the Victorian Gothic town hall.  A  new sign on the pavement, pointing inside, declared a Covid pop-up Post Office, in the building.  In my handbag I was carrying a card I had made to cheer up the reason for the tooth grinding (one woman charm offensive that I am), so I turned left and began to climb the impressive flight of be-pillared stone steps leading up to the town hall.  I was wearing smart trousers and my newish jumper and carrying a large green plastic Marks and Spencer clothing bag and my handbag and also wearing my sunglasses, a mask, and my blue nitrile gloves.  I thought I looked like ordinary me, out shopping, but opinions, apparently, were divided. At the top of the steps stood the lady mayor, in full rig.  Smart suit, long black robes, huge gold chain big enough to moor an ocean liner, and effusive smile.  She held out her hand.

‘Hello!’ she gushed, ‘How absolutely wonderful to meet you!  Utterly delightful. We are so pleased you’ve come here today, it’s wonderful!’

I know I’ve written a blog for eleven years but I don’t think anybody knows about it except you.  Almost certainly probably not the mayor of the next town.

Nonplussed I muttered through my mask, eloquence on wheels, as usual, ‘Um, I’ve just come to post a letter.’

I gestured towards the sign behind her that was helpfully indicating: Post Office.  This Way.

The lady Mayor withdrew her extended hand, squinted at me and repeated, ‘Delightful,’ though, to be fair, her tone was wavering slightly.

We stood and looked at each other, me in my natural position in life, short, carrying stuff, one step down, her, tall, naturally wavy fair hair, slim, in a suit, wearing a gold hawser, with medallions, one step up.  Seasons passed, leaves blew off trees, snow came and went, pages floated off calendars, dinosaurs roamed the earth and then, didn’t.

Behind me a commotion as a short lady bearing a large camera and a clip board arrived on the bottom step and began issuing orders: ‘Mayor, hello, can you stand there please, and we’ll have the Guides half on this level and half on that, third step, I think.’

Without blinking the mayor stepped round me and down, going:  ‘Hello!  absolutely wonderful to meet you!  Thank you so much for coming!’

Chucked aside like yesterday’s underpants I processed up the last step, into the town hall, stopping briefly at the cobbled-together Covid-safe desk with wire screen, to give my name, telephone number, blood group, dates of jabs, contact tracing details, shoe size and voting preferences and thence along the corridor into the even-more cobbled together Post Office, which was another wire screen on goldish legs, a coffee table from somewhere, a pair of brass scales and two large men in shirt sleeves.

‘I just want to post a letter,’  I said, proffering it.

‘Oh, dunno.  Do we do letters, Brian?’

‘Yer.  Put it in a bag, I spose.  That un.’

‘Oh, OK’

I handed it over and left, on my way out inching sideways down the Town Hall steps to avoid being included in the photograph of several dozen children and the lady mayor, still smiling, slightly insanely.

Amazingly the letter arrived, two days later.

The second case of mistaken identity occurred to a friend, whose weekly phone call was much enlivened by the story.

My friend, who I’ll call L, has a friend they all call Chaos Kate, though she probably wasn’t christened that.

Chaos Kate, turning sixty, fed up with all the Covid restrictions, decided to have a very large party, hired a marquee and sent out 300 invitations.

L received hers, and, despite reservations about that many people in one place at once, and having discovered that a friend with a car had also been invited, consulted her wardrobe.  She decided the celebration warranted a brocade dress and a hat and thus attired, was waiting with the huge plate of contributory horsd’oeuvres she had made, as requested by her hostess, at not inconsiderable cost to the guest, nicely arranged on her best serving plate, for her friend’s car.  The exact location had not been specified on the invitation, but her friend, having driven around the local countryside frequently, had a good idea of which country lane was likely to be the ideal spot for a hired marquee.  Sure enough, some way out of town, up a dirt track, the fencing gave way to a huge marquee in a field with adjacent parking.

They parked, disembarked, retrieved the massive serving platter of horsd’oeuvres and set forth.  In the marquee it was plain they were early, so L inquired of the catering staff, who were still laying out the very splendid tables, where to put her gigantic catering contribution.

‘Oh,’ warbled the waitress, ‘It’s not necessary, you know, it’s all catered,’ but she took the platter off L and headed through the far away tent flap with it.

L and her friend were offered glasses of champagne and. sipping cheerfully, began to mingle with the rest of the arriving guests.  L inquiring occasionally if anyone had seen Kate, the hostess, though no one had, but, as the crowd swelled, and the marquee was huge that was not surprising. 

What was surprising was how their mutual friend Chaos Kate. had managed to organise such a sumptuous occasion.  The many long tables, were bedecked with wonderful flower arrangements, with lovely lace and beadwork details, abundant silver cutlery, pristine napery and a little card at each place setting indicating the location of each guest for dinner.  L and her friend wandered the marquee, reading labels, occasionally meeting up to see if either had spotted their names, chatting to the other guests and sipping champagne.

This pleasant state of affairs continued for a most enjoyable hour until it became clear that every label had been read without one single familiar name, even misspelled, having been spotted.  A quick shufty up and down all the tables confirmed the interesting and indeed, growing, suspicion that there was a strong possibility that they were in the wrong tent.

Leaving as unobtrusively as possible, they were just in time, driving out of the field to pass the bride, in a limo, driving in.

Several hundred yards up the country lane was another field, and another massive marquee.  They drew up with a flourish in the mud, and, entering the huge tent found exactly twelve people, one of whom was the hostess in tears.

She was sad because no one had come, including her husband who had a lengthy hospital appointment that weekend.  The others hadn’t arrived because there was no RSVP on the invitation, as well as no address.  That was a pity because the live music she had booked was there and did indeed prove to be some chap with a guitar far away in the corner of the tent, no doubt banking on subsequent bookings from 300 people.

Sadly the venue had been booked for the whole weekend and my friend L and her friend with the car, anticipating jollity, had booked a nearby hotel for the night but were handily on hand for a repeat performance with the box of tissues the following day, when sadly dwindling numbers drew the weekend-long birthday celebrations to a close.

It is very very sad, this sort of thing.  If anyone knows how to get a serving dish back from an unknown caterers, with or without the horsd’oeuvres (which had cost my friend £14 to make), she’d be glad of the information.

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You’re meant to plan your life, these days.  I know this because there was this inspirational couple (who were very inspiring because they’d lost weight and she’d had her teeth fixed, so they started lecturing, as you do) who issued a list of ten ways to get stuff under control.  You are what you eat was one, which might explain my dodgy knee, and Plan Your Life was another.

So I bought a planner.

These are big business at present and I saw the one I bought on The Craft Store channel, which used to be Hochanda.  Our Leonie was waxing lyrical about it and showed us the planners of other presenters and told me I needed this in my life, so I bought one.  (I am an advertiser’s dream, I really am.)

I was too old to do the Filofax thing.  These, as I understand them, were a huge diary with bits falling off that you carried around in your handbag.  Then, said Leonie, you got a smart phone and all the stuff went on that.  I may be puzzled because these are two vital steps for the Modern Woman that I completely missed out on.  The entire planet is connected by mobile phone, except me and a couple of old men deep in the Amazon rainforest and a logging family in Alaska, who can’t get a signal.

Why do you need to be connected to everyone else all the time?  Why is it that the OH gets upset when TV channels disappear?  He watches the same 1980s legal dramas continuously anyway.  I can join in with the dialogue as I pass through the lounge without even looking at the screen.

Planning your TV viewing is pointless, which coincidentally is the name of a TV quiz show, and a description.  No one would ever need to write that down in a planner. it’s just the thing that is on when you’re waiting for the news.  I am willing to bet substantial amounts (6d.) that round the world the thing that is on before the news on TV is some bit of vacuous filler. Nobody ever deliberately watched the programme before the news.  Back in the day when the S&H was a child and considerably more effort was put into the content of television, there were some very entertaining programmes for children on before the news, Dangermouse, the Magic Roundabout and Blue Peter spring unbidden to mind.  Parents and children watched them together before it was realised that television was an unpaid babysitter and there were a million channels and nothing to watch. I am so old I remember the interlude between black and white television shows.  This occurred while they were winding up the cameras again and was a soothing piece of footage of The Potter’s Wheel, a waterfall, a Windmill and assorted country scenes.  Aged three I sat, amazed.  (You have to remember that the only other family entertainment was my mother on the piano, stuck on lesson two, or lighting the fire with rolled up newspaper and a can of paraffin.)

So, whilst I enjoyed the Radio Times, I never used it to plan my viewing, I was never sufficiently senior to make the decisions.  The only TV viewing decision I made was to get up early enough on Saturday morning to watch TISWAS when I was a young teacher and Lenny Henry was thin.

I shall not be using my planner to plan my television viewing therefore.

I am trying to lose weight without dieting but I am an entire lifetime past writing down recipes.  Now, there’s a thing and an entire industry of a thing.  Weight loss recipes, a multi-million pound oxymoron.  Making people who wish to be thinner focus on the food to the extent of buying special ingredients and spend hours in the kitchen doing stuff with them, is just school playground bullying with focus.  Give us your dinner money, or else, and as well, we’ll make you fatter, fat kid.  Focus on the thing you want more of, eg thighs.

Food will not feature in my planner.

I don’t think there’s going to be much writing because the time you spend planning writing in the planner you could have actually been writing, rather than writing about writing.

I am beginning to suspect that planners fall into the category of: those who can do, those who can’t, plan.

House makeover?

Been there done that.  (I still have one pair of curtains to make, which I intend to get on with rather than writing about.)

Gardening.  Well, it’s June,whatever it is should be in the ground now.  I did have a plan for the damp bottom corner of the garden, you know shade loving ,wet loving plants but then the OH went and planted a shed there.  Any day now he is hoping the carpenter will pop round to advise him about getting rid of the water under the floor.  Ideally before he and his heavy machinery fall through the rotting bit.

Clothes planning?  Absolutely not, I am a slave to QVCs clothing department as it is.  I am completely allergic to any shopping for clothing that involves getting changed in a tiny fitting room with strange lightbulbs and peculiar mirrors that light up my varicose veins like Blackpool illuminations.  And as for communal changing rooms, which existed for a while, there is no better time travel to get you back to the worst bit of school sports, which was the pavilion, a brick outbuilding that you could have made ice lollies in during a heatwave just by putting  fluid in a container and lying it on the bench for five minutes.

So I will not be planning my apparel.

Money?  I have discovered that all is well providing you stop spending prior to running out of money.  When I first left home I did keep a financial planner of sorts.  In a book keeping book I wrote down every penny coming in and going out, for and from three of us in a flat.  At the end of term I divvied up the spare and everyone was happy.  After fifty years of that I can now do it in my head.

Not money in the planner.

You see the real problem with a planner, as in life, is that you can only plan what you will do.  There is sadly, absolutely no way of planning for the damn fool stuff that other people do.  You simply cannot.  People going round sneezing on other people in a pandemic cannot be planned for or accounted for. The idiots who had early Covid parties have taken themselves out of the planner and off the planet.

People who leave you vomiting blood after cancer surgery to go and get drunk, how can you plan for that?  People who wish to be politicians because they have a shoulder full of chips, becoming politicians and then acting like politicians and making stupid laws, well, you simply can’t legislate for that.  Somebody rummaging round in your stomach and knotting up your intestines while you are under anaesthetic and unable to tell them to stop, can’t plan for that.

You cannot plan for other people or natural disasters or other people causing disasters.

You cannot, in short, plan for entropy.

The world, indeed, the entire universe, tend towards chaos.  Entropy rules KP?  It’s nuts but there you are.

I have ordered some stickers.

I will stick them in the planner so that I have the illusion of curing entropy.

The planner has a (I think) unique system of removing the punctured pages from solid disks down the side of the book very easily.  So you can stick the stickers on and then rip the pages out with ease and shred them without jamming the shredder on staples.

Now that, I approve of.

If you can plan not to spend three and a half hours of your life unjamming the shredder, that’s three and a half hours you’ve got back, to be writing in a planner, or sticking stickers in it, or, just, you know, living.

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Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that I visited this topic previously many years ago.  As this blog has been going so very long, there is a possibility I was a mere child in my fifties when I did the writing.  I recall (vaguely, like watching a black and white film through custard) that I considered the principle sign of ageing to be a fondness for wearing cardigans.  I may also have waxed lyrical about the possibility of scarves and slippers.

The French have a saying about it which translates as: If youth only knew, if age only could.  Droit dans, soeur!

With the stupidity of youf and, obviously, from this point of view, I didn’t take into account bits dropping off. 

Bits dropping off becomes a major topic of interest when you get well past retirement.  I always thought the purpose of retirement was to give you time for hobbies.  It’s not.  It’s because you can’t do an honest day’s work without falling asleep in the middle, or, bits, dropping off.  Fingers and toes are top of the list.  These are underappreciated until age and arthritis sets in.  For no reason your thumb hurts, swells up and refuses to help you take the top off a bottle. Toes just go on strike.  I have a toe that sticks up because I broke it when I was in my twenties and the Xray missed the hairline fracture so I continued to wear high heels and it set.  Up.  Last November, still in sandals and trying to prolong the lockdown summer, I walked into a drawer, broke it again and didn’t go to hospital, which I’d heard was full of people sneezing.  My toe went an interesting shade of black and purple as if it was auditioning for a limp-on part in a Gothic novel.  It was interesting colours and awfully painful for weeks.  So I loosened my orthopaedic sandals and carried on.  But I forgot to tighten them again, so, in a few months, my other foot fell into the hole I’d created.  I kept waking up with a swollen ankle. thinking I had sprained it. I did arch strengthening exercises for weeks (toes like a duck, up on your points, sloooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwly down.) to no avail, still waking with a sprained ankle and by now walking on the wrong side of that ankle instead of the foot and gardening like a deer run over by a tractor.

Then I remembered and did my sandals up.  Der.

You see, your what’s it called goes.  Um.  Thingy.  Memory!   The part of your brain that hasn’t dropped off is asking: why are we limping?  No, really, why are we limping?  Have we always walked on our ankle, like this?  This hurts!  Is this normal?

Readers who also have shortened memories, (quick quiz: what did you have for lunch yesterday?  Me neither.) will recall me going on a not diet a week ago when the OH bought a new pair of scales that actually work and tell the truth, which is, obvs. a shocking thing for a pair of scales to do.  I don’t really want to know and I am the woman who, at my last bone density scan found myself plea bargaining with the nurse about my height.  That drops off as well.  So, even if you stay the same weight, if you’re losing height, you’ll be overweight.  Get short enough and you’ll look like you’ve been sat on by an elephant.  How fair is that?

I took heed of the treacherous item, climbed upon it three times a day (never get weighed at teatime) and behaved accordingly.  Two days ago my intestines played up and I had a couple of days when I couldn’t eat anyway.  So I have lost weight.  Ten years ago, I would have been delighted and amazed, triumphant and obnoxiously self congratulatory.

Now, however, what I am mainly, is wrinkly.

Fat makes you look round and youthful.

Wrinkles make you look wrinkly.  There’s a character in the Simpsons who is very very wrinkly, if she goes on strike I could be a stand-in.

Everything loses collagen, including your bladder and the capacity of your bladder.

I am the idiot who redesigned a house so I had a walk-in wardrobe.  Anyone with intelligence (I remember having intelligence – or was that someone else?) would have designed a walk-in toilet rather than having to trek along the landing six times a night.  Any senior reader who wishes to write saying:  Six times a night!  Only six, that’s luxury that is, wait till you’re eighty, sunshine, may.  I will definitely publish all polite comments about how often we leave the warmth of bed for the long trek, we need to know this stuff briefly before we forget it forever or until we are eighty, when I will be writing about the wonderful exercise available to eighty year olds during the night time and the necessity of teatime being the last cup of tea for the next five hours. Like the motorway petrol station in the back of beyond that warns you :  Last petrol for fifty miles, fill up now, three gold bars per pint and for a diamond necklace we’ll sneeze in your tyres too. And you think they’re just trying to drum up business until you run out in a particularly lonesome stretch with wolf noises.

Have I mentioned memory?

Then there’s memory as well, of course.

You already know about my cataracts affecting my poof raiding, so I’ll not bing ern a pout thait.

Then there’s tinnitus.  My friend lived in a house haunted by constant whining noises.

It was actually her mother unable to find the bottle opener, but she did have tinnitus and said the drink helped her forget.

I have broken off two weak fingernails that I was just beginning to grow, gardening.  So I have coated them with the strengthening stuff and now have two shiny nails, that gouge out lumps of skin every time I blow my nose and all the rest plain, but fortunately odd nails are fashionable.

I have been gardening for a week straight, apart from a day at the hairdressers, re-laid a lawn, dug everything and planted whatever I could lay my hands on or wrest off the slugs.  Ten years ago I would have felt, fit, trim, worked-out.

Now I feel about a hundred and three, with wrinkles. I have wrinkly arms, swollen ankles, a wrinkly chin, a tight grey perm and a big fat thumb.

So I’m going to have a cardigan, a scarf and an early night with six loo breaks from sleep to hobble down the corridor, in the hope I can remember exactly why I am hobbling down the corridor on my ankles in the middle of the night.

Seven signs of ageing, upon consideration, may have been somewhat of an understatement.

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