The Old Grey Thinker

  There’s a man in Trafalgar Square. He’s not sightseeing. He’s not feeding the pigeons. He’s praying — loudly, publicly, with several hundred others, blocking the road and making absolutely certain you notice. There’s a mosque ten minutes away. He knows that. You know that. The square is the point. I watched this on the news and felt something I’m apparently no longer supposed to feel: irritation. Plain, ordinary, non-criminal irritation. The kind my father’s generation would have called common sense. Instead I did the calculation my generation has quietly learned to do. Can I say this out loud? Is noticing this permitted? Have I become, without being informed, one of the people whose opinions require a content warning? I grew up in a country where you could doubt God without it being a social offence. We used to call that civilisation. Let me be precise — because precision matters now in a way it didn’t used to, and I want to stay on the right side of whatever line someone has dr...

  Why Getting Older Feels Like a Series of Small Humiliations If you’ve ever wondered why ageing doesn’t arrive as a grand, cinematic “new phase” but instead turns up as a steady drip of petty inconveniences, it’s because the whole thing is basically managed by a department that specialises in mild humiliation and surprise rule-changes. People say, very breezily, “You’re only as old as you feel.” Which is a lovely thought, isn’t it. It sounds like something printed on a mug in a garden centre, next to a plaque that says Live Laugh Love and a wind chime that makes you want to commit minor crimes. Because the problem with “only as old as you feel” is that it assumes you feel one age, consistently, like a yoghurt with a best-before date. In reality, you feel about seven different ages before breakfast. You don’t feel old. You feel… intermittently betrayed. There’s the age you feel when you wake up and attempt to sit up. There’s the age you feel when you realise you’ve been lying ther...