‘I don’t know if it is a sign of old age,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse in the mid-1950s, ‘but I find I hate Christmas more every year.’ Another marked change that the Master noticed in ‘the senile Wodehouse’ was that he no longer had the party spirit and preferred to stay at home with a good book. Both these observations are quoted in a pleasantly discursive set of reflections on old age, The Time of Your Life, compiled and illustrated by John Burningham (Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 288, ISBN 0747560854), which would certainly tempt one not to venture out.
The principal themes are how quickly time passes for the old (as Christopher Fry remarked, ‘After the age of 80 you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes’) and the relief of not having to worry about what others think. This is best expressed by Tom Sharpe:
I liked the vignette of Alexander Chancellor, in his late fifties, buying a ticket for a stately home and being asked, ‘Are you an adult?’In the past I was regarded as a bad-tempered and opinionated bastard or, by more tolerant people, as an idiot. In old age one escapes this condemnation. I am simply an old fool to be patted on the head and given another pink gin.
The abiding joy of Wodehouse is that he never became ‘an adult’. As his cherished chronicler, Richard Usborne, happily still with us at 92, writes in Plum Sauce (Ebury Press, £14.99, pp. 232, ISBN 0091883008 -the same title, incidentally, used for the charming show by that peerless performer of the Master’s work, Jonathan Cecil, and his wife Anna Sharkey):
His books were always young and all his elders, even the stuffed shirts, had been young once. Even the awesome Roderick Spode, Lord Sidcup, had stolen a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night and was still proud of it.
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