Too much too young

I am becoming increasingly fond of The Word magazine, and not just because they’ve mentioned my Noughties book for the third time in two issues. I suppose it’s because their prejudices gel with mine, not least in their overview of the bests and worsts of the past decade: The Wire, Twitter, winning the Ashes, BBC4, Heston Blumenthal, Brian Blessed on HIGNFY in the first camp; reality TV, The Da Vinci Code and Ugg boots in the latter.

But then we reach their Top 10 books of the last 10 years (I like to console myself with the notion that my tome was hovering somewhere around 11 or 12), and Christopher Bray’s take on Austerity Britain: 1945-1951, by David Kynaston, which is lauded as a “gloriously open-armed account of the era in which Word readers’ parents were setting up home.”

Except that my parents got married in 1966. Does this mean I’m 15 years too young to read The Word?

Early onset

It was quite simple, really: go into the front yard; open the front gate and put the wheelie bin outside; then get the bed linen off the drying-rack-thingy and bring it into the house.

It was only when the passing cyclist gave me that look that says in all languages of the world: “Why has that balding farang just wheeled his fully laden drying-rack-thingy out through the gate and put it where the bins go?” that I realised I might have been working too hard these last few weeks.