Tempus fugit

Time flies like a winged arrow - although, as Groucho famously added, fruit flies like a banana.

Anyhow, it will not have escaped your attention that August is now moving among us. For many, the significance will be that there are now more hours weekly during which they have to accept responsibility for their offspring; for others, it will mean a faster commute, as mothers take a break from daily ferrying their little darlings the few hundred yards to school.

For me, it means that I shall reach my half-century next month. I don't want to do that. I want to be 21 again, or 33, or 11 ... I want to be younger.

If I could track down the lunatic responsible for the canard about life beginning at 40, I should wreak severe physical damage upon their person, in punishment for promulgating such a despicable untruth. Did my life begin ten years ago? Hardly. I'm still waiting and I would not claim to be doing so with any great optimism.

A week or so back, the quack was obliged to warn me that when they knock me out, so that he can rummage around within my knee, there is an extremely remote chance of my being struck by any of a range of terrors, including deep vein thrombosis. He was most insistent upon playing down the likelihood of any such thing happening, while mentioning every faint possibility. If I thought that failing to awake from the anaesthetic was a real chance, I'd change my name and deny any knowledge of this prospective patient. This is, I fear, another manifestation of the Elfunsafety menace.