Obiter Dicta

11th September 2011

I find myself approaching my 60^th birthday this week with a piquant blend of emotions. Part of me is flabbergasted that I’ve got this far. How can a sprite be 60? I look back over the years and find that I’ve been a lucky sod all my life: cherished by parents, doted on by grandparents and wider family; and, most of all, lucky in love. I found the Gold Ticket in Love’s lottery really early on. I married my soulmate and we have a daughter who has been a source of happiness all her life and who has presented us with two beautiful granddaughters who bid fair to be likewise.

And I’ll stop the goo there, so that the reader can  inject with insulin before continuing.

What I don’t have is what I half expected. A feeling of having fallen into the ‘sere, the yellow leaf’. There are no gathering swallows twittering in my skies. And this is a man who knows gathering and twittering when he sees it. In  my youth, sixty was the age of my grandfather and his cronies: bent old men (bent physically, not morally) who walked with sticks and whose eyes purged amber and plum-tree gum. I don’t feel like that at all. Maybe 60 is the new mellow.

I have been working on the - hopefully - final proofs of my memoir, ‘The Locked Ward’. In these here times, seeing a book from the PC screen to publication still requires a great deal of scanning intermediate versions. Even though the days of hot metal are gone. Scrutinising the flat proofs in June was a hell of a task. I read the damned things ten times in two weeks. I’ll probably never read it again, once it comes out. At least I wasn’t like one of my literary heroes. Joyce must have driven compositors and typesetters daft when proofreading ‘Ulysses’. He added so much that the novel grew by a third at the proofreading stage. Rather, I cut out a few sections that I felt were impeding the flow and I think the book is better for it.

And finally, now that I have almost certainly reached old fogeydom, what the hell happened to commas? I have been aware of this for a long time, but publishers tend not to like them any more. For whatever reason. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions on which I have had to pause in the reading of a sentence to go back and pick up a lost thread, the fault of a missing comma. Commas exist to prevent ambiguity. Let them be used. I provide, free of charge, a gross for you to use whenever your reading material is deficient in them.

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