“We don’t grow older. We grow riper.”
Pablo Picasso
“Someone cites it, and I steal it.”
Mary Sands
Golden Years was a song, I recall, we could not get enough of in our early twenties. Overstall, I recall, was obsessed by it, as he was the Ficus Benjamin, which still stands tall in the hall of our flat. However, I have not heard it since, so I decided to look up the words. At first it did not make all that much sense to me. All this talk of running for the shadows, which seems rather counter-intuitive, until, as Angus once put it to me, you have to face a polar on an ice-cap. Life always seems so dramatic when you’re going through it, doesn’t it? Then when you get to the other end, you realise it’s all a storm in a teacup… Mabel, whose head is now swimming, wants me to add: it’s preferable to drink out of bone china, which, I think, is a rather unfashionable view.