An 89-year-old man at the retirement home got down on one knee and asked me to marry him

to find out what an old person’s existing arrangements actually are.

Not to pay for anything. Not to decide anything. To ring up and ask.

I was furious with her for about four days and then I was furious with something considerably larger and have been ever since, and in the April I joined the thing that I am now on a committee of, which I will not go on about here.

What I have had to take.

Everybody who hears this wants it to be about the home, and the home is not blameless and I have written to them, and there is now a form in that building’s admission pack that was not there before.

But mine is not about them.

On the fourth Wednesday in the May, I said not yet to a twenty-six-year-old with a trolley, and then I went and played chess.

And for five