I don’t think it’s a question of how you feel. Most people, it seems to me, inhabit a mental age that is theirs for life. Teenagers who have the cast of mind of a sixty-year old, nonogenerians  who think like twenty-year olds – we have all met them and recognise them in ourselves. Jon Snow, the broadcaster, was interviewed recently. He was asked about the age difference between him, aged sixty-six and his wife, a forty year old surgeon. He agreed that it was a big gap – as he was only twenty-one and she was definitely forty and getting wider as he was now feeling more like seventeen. I’ll go for thirty.

And I have many dreams: too many places to visit, things to learn and friendships to enjoy. But what about regrets? Of course: they are the collateral of age, the price you pay for that privilege. I don’t mean this is in the sense of remorse – the regret you feel for a hurt or bad deed that you cannot undo, but rather that any life is the sum of choices – and every choice, turning or door opened along that long corridor means that there were others that you could have chosen and which would have lead to another life – but you didn’t. And now you can’t. It’s too late to be a ballet dancer or a racing driver. As Arthur Miller nicely put it,’Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’

Does it matter? Not, of course, in the life of the world – that goes on blithely without you. But you only inhabit your brief flare of the match – your only reality. Did you fill your space and can you still fill other spaces yet? It occurs to me that this is a great privilege given to writers. You get a second peek, another walk down that corridor, another chance to open another door. And perhaps you can help others to come to terms with their own lacunae that are the twins of getting old by taking a look with you.

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer who describes life in Gaza in her novel Out of It. At any moment of any day and night drones are criss-crossing the tiny territory. Their noise is ubiquitous. As you go about your daily business you are aware that someone, somewhere, is looking at you – and their gaze is malignant. Every now and then – and such an event is brilliantly described in the novel – a thunderbolt comes seemingly from nowhere and eviscerates an enemy of Isreal as he or she is walking down a street. They might be taking a child to school or watching a football match. There is no warning.

Life in such a place must be unbearable.  Imagine living all your life with someone watching you with the intention not of protecting you, pace CTTV cameras, but of doing you harm – all day, every day. It’s like the Truman Show and 1984 rolled together – and real.

“You get ugly when you get old. It’s all perfectly simple. In fact I can tell you how it’s going to go. Everything seems fine until you’re about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, “While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it’s a funny thing, but I’m an exception to that rule.”

Then it becomes a full-time job trying to convince yourself that it’s true. And you can actually feel your youth depart. In your mid-forties when you look in the mirror this idea that you’re an exception evaporates.

Then, you think life is going to get thinner and thinner until it dwindles into nothing. But a very strange thing happens to you, a very good thing happens to you, in your early fifties, and I’m assuming – this is what novelists do, they assume their case is typical: a poet can’t be typical about anything, but a novelist is an everyman, and an innocent and literary being – but you assume that how you feel is how everyone feels, and it’s like discovering another continent on the globe.

What happens is you’re suddenly visited by the past, and it’s like a huge palace in your mind, and you can go and visit all these different rooms and staircases and chambers. It’s particularly the erotic, the amatory past. And if you have children they somehow are very present in this palace of the past.

I say to my sons (I don’t say it to my daughters), “When you’re having an affair, keep notes. Hold it in the fist of your soul. Try and remember everything about it, because this is what you’re going to need when you’re old. You’re going to need these rooms, with a girl in each one.”

Nabokov said the big difference between people is those who sleep well, and those who don’t. And Nabokov was of course a champion insomniac. He has a lovely line in a late novella which is, “Night is always a giant but this one was especially terrible.”

Zadie Smith says that people divide into the organised and the disorganised. And she’s disorganised. But my father, Kingsley Amis, said that a huge division is between those who have a good time with the opposite sex, and those who don’t. And you will know in your early fifties how that balance sheet works.

Just to go a little bit later, because I’m 62 now… Another feeling comes on you when you’re 60, which can be expressed by the thought, “This can’t turn out well.” And that’s the bit I’m at at the moment. And really that’s the arrival of fear. In my case not fear of death, but fear of getting there.

So to go back to your question, yes you do look back with wonder at your youth, and you know all youth is automatically beautiful in a way. It’s said that youth is wasted on the young, and that’s perhaps true because you don’t feel your beauty until its gone.”

Gypsies, or Roma, are the most mysterious – and reviled – people in Europe. This is an interesting and balanced article from Prospect.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/why-we-should-be-alarmed-about-the-roma/#.Uua9iWTFIlI

It is becoming apparent that it is almost impossible for the Conservatives to win an outright majority. Those high principled Lib Dems saw to that when they shot down the proposed boundary changes that are well overdue in a fit of pique when the Conservatives refused to back their half-baked ideas for an elected House of Lords. Why this was a political football rather than something dealt with by an impartial Royal Commission is a good question.

Their added problem is that UKIP are the recipients of the ‘swivel-eyed loon’ votes who would normally be the right wing of the Tory party. Gay marriage is deep anathema to the genuine Tories of old – Anglican traditionalists particularly. Cameron – rightly – wanted to claim the middle ground but with this particular policy has made enemies who will not vote for him even it means letting Milliband and Balls into Downing Street.  Lack of Boundary Changes, UKIP and a couple of own goals have given the Tories an almost impossible electoral mountain to climb even if they achieve a majority of the popular vote

Back to Milliband. It is sometimes forgotten that the Parliamentary Labour Party never voted for him. He got the leadership by the Trade Union block vote. He has the lowest opinion poll rating for any party leader – ever. Yet he will almost certainly end up in No 10 in a Lib-Lab coalition with a Lib Dem party that is almost as unpopular. He could be prime minister with almost no one voting for him

And there is one other extraordinary possible twist to this sorry scenario. If the Scotts vote for independence in 2014 (why don’t the English and the Welsh get to vote on this  too?) they, apparently, still get to vote in the 2015 UK General Election.

Work that one out.

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4.Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease.

11. Karmageddon : It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you!

13. Glibido : All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The colour you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.

8. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

9. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.

10. Testicle, n. A humorously question on an exam.

I was eighteen and had just left school. I had a girlfriend whose parents had a small chateau in Brittany near St Malo (her mother was French). It was not a great success as I was overflowing with joie de vivre and  testosterone and rather lacking in judgement and tact. You get the idea?

We had been to the beach on velocetes and returned to find a drinks party in full swing with the guests standing and sitting on the steps of the chateau that looked over the drive and a small lake. Cars were lined up on the drive. I was staying in a small flat above the garage which was uphill from the house. I parked my velocete next to a gleaming open-top Triumph Stag. Being eighteen and full of joie de vivre, testosterone and a recently acquired driving license, I got into the car and pretended that I was James Hunt – before going up to change for the party.

Wearing my tight loons, kipper tie and wide lapelled jacket (this was the 70s) I walked towards the party to find a scene of mayhem. Men were gesticulating (this was France) and women crying (as well they might) and everyone was surrounding and pointing at cars in various states of destruction…..including a gleaming Triumph Stag.

It took a few seconds for the awful truth to sink in. Waves of denial followed and…….I genuinely can’t remember what happened next. I know I fessed up (I had to) but how it played out has (thankfully) been blanked.

I don’t think I was asked again.

I couldn’t disagree with him more.

In fact I’m with the late, great, Quentin Crisp in his belief that the very foundation of civil (in the sense of polite) society is founded on lies: after all, only the very young, the very rude or the very stupid never lie. These lies go from the minor, ‘of course your bum doesn’t look big in that’, through to the serious, ‘of course the chemo is working’.

Ah, but these are white lies I hear you think. Yes, but untruths nonetheless and the ayatollah for truth, my brother-in-law, would say that there can be no exceptions – except maybe the bum bit; I know this because I’ve heard him do it. I would push this further and say that there is only so much truth the human condition can take. Politicians know this as they refuse, for example, to tell us the that the welfare state as it stands cannot continue. If we won’t hear the truth, why tell it? The aphorism that more marriages have been wrecked by honesty than any infidelity is surely so powerful because we sense its veracity. As Graham Greene said ‘In human relations, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.’ Lies, big and small, don’t make the world go round – but they oil the joints.

The early sixties were still grey and frugal. It had much more in common with the austerity of the immediate post-war period than the hippy hedonism of the early seventies. The village in which I was bought up in rural Leicestershire was approached by three gated roads and electricity had only arrived there eight years before I was born. Almost everyone was employed in agriculture and the number of elderly spinsters was remarkable: they had lost their prospective husbands in the First World War. As we drove to school in the morning, listening to the Light Programe on the wireless, our neighbour would be walking with a bale of hay on a pitchfork over his shoulder to feed his sheep. He had neither a car nor a tractor. War comics – trash mags – were my preferred reading. Every adult had been involved, if only as a child, in one or both wars and their language and attitudes were shaped by it. Military rank and record were the measure of status: a ‘good war’ was a guarantee of respect and its antithesis, ‘a bad war’, whispered behind hands and an invisible mark of Cain.

Class-consciousness was woven into the fabric of life at that time in a way that my children literally cannot comprehend: they don’t have the antennae that, if we weren’t born with, we imbibed with our mothers’ milk. Everyone was put in a box by dress and speech. A misplaced vowel or the wrong tie condemned as ‘non U’ or ‘common’ in a way that could never be understood now by anyone under forty (well, almost anyone – there are pockets left, but only pockets). It was a caste system where everyone had their place and if they forgot it they were reminded by slights and put-downs. It was another country – one where homosexuality was illegal. Whatever was good about that time – and there were many things – obsession with class was a real cancer that had no good side. It twisted peoples’ lives both for those on the way down in their genteel poverty, and those on their way up who found their way up blocked by all sorts of glass ceilings. There are still, of course, terrible inequalities and a widening gulf between those with money and education and those without. But it’s not the same thing.