Suddenly I am seventy-nine years old. I find that ridiculous but chronologically it is a fact. I recall with distaste old Sam Beckett’s pessimistic shout: “We breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideas!” Surely it is not a year since my last birthday. Doris Lessing in her autobiography Under My Skin describes how perception of time passing changes utterly as one gets older. She describes her experience as a child:
“How far away it was, the condition of being grown up and free, for I was still in the state when the end of the day could hardly be glimpsed from its start… there is no way of conveying in words the difference between child-time and grown-up time… in the story of a life, if it is being told true to time as outwardly experienced, then I’d say 70% of the book
