Confronted by an age-old truth

These days I feel young. In some ways I get younger and younger. I have many teenage aspects to my personality and large parts of my heart still dwell in the school playground, where they’re half braced for comments such as, “No offence but I hate your shoes.”

I made a new friend this week, someone I can imagine sharing lots of time and jokes and songs with down the years until we are both very old. The sense of excitement at this fledgling friendship, the careful husbandry it requires — not too much, not too little — has made me feel very young, infantile almost.

I also seem to have fewer responsibilities than when I was a girl, when I spent a great deal of time worrying about my parents, my siblings, about the bills piling up in the hall, about my friends, about my teachers. I remember once or twice the mothers of school friends unburdening themselves to me while their daughters were out of the room. They would ask my advice about their husbands’ suspected philandering. I worried about these women, too.

But I don’t worry quite so much any more, which also makes me feel young. I used to be very serious and deliberately decided to become less so, in order to make myself more suitable for human consumption, so to speak, and that process made me feel younger.

Also, I am more carefree now. I am lighter of outlook and that makes me feel young. I take comfort from anything and everything automatically, whether I need it or not, as children do. The amount of excitement a cup of coffee can cause is frankly ridiculous, as though each cup were a little adventure. Even a pantomime joke about coffee can stimulate me wildly: “Lost my husband. He fell into a vat of Nescafe. Least it was instant.”

Thinking of the nuns that pray round the clock at the Tyburn Convent at Marble Arch for the wellbeing of the people of London makes me feel young. If you have any problem or need, you are invited to email your petition using an online form...

Failing novelists

But this week something happened that made me feel old. I was in Oxford, at a formal dinner, sitting next to a very shiny 19-year-old. We discussed the life stretched out before him. He seemed to have all the talents. A scientist — a physics scholar — he also liked to direct plays in his spare time and he could sing and play the piano to a professional level. But what he really loved was writing. He wanted to be a writer, he said. He belonged to a prestigious university writing group called the Failed Novelists’ Society. He said it with some ceremony. I googled it later. It has quite the manifesto:

We are a support group for failing novelists.

Some of us wrote terrible novels when we were young.

Some of us wrote terrible novels embarrassingly recently.

Some of us are still trying.

Some of us will start trying again later at some point in future.

“When I was at this college,” I told him, “Joseph Heller of Catch-22 fame came to teach us. He thought we were a sorry bunch. I read a story that was about a young girl who married a gay man from America so that he could stay in the country, while her actual boyfriend went out to sea on drugs. After I finished, Heller nodded and said, ‘I’m not interested in art, I’m interested in publishable works of fiction.’ So that was me told.” The shiny young man looked at me with a small amount of interest.

“Some of the lessons were televised,” I told him. “Very late at night, but as with any TV appearance you’ll find it’s always a bit amazing quite how many people seem to catch it.”

The young man drained his glass and looked at me, his interest stirred. “That must have been interesting,” he said. I started to nod. “Well it sort of was, because Heller was . . . “

“It must have been so interesting,” he weighed his words, “such a privilege to have been a part of the early days of television.” Oh!

I lowered my eyes and bit my lip. “Yes, Heller used to arrive in his horse and cart,” I almost said. “We all wore bonnets,” I almost said.

Instead, I looked away and I resolved to purchase an expensive new face cream as soon as the shops were open in the morning.

—Financial Times