Old habits make sense

‘Develop your eccentricities while you are young,’ said David Ogilvy. ‘That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going gaga.’

I am 46. And I am happily beginning to discover that a lot of habits I once thought ‘geriatric’ are in fact common sense. I haven’t yet started wearing beige or buying shoes that close with Velcro, but I’m tempted. And last week I gave in to one urge and went around the house compulsively labelling things.

I haven’t reached the point where my remote controls and radios have little torn shreds of sticky paper attached to them with hand-drawn arrows labelling buttons ‘video’, ‘Radio 4’ and ‘off’. But I have started labelling all our bloody chargers. As a family, we travel with about 14 of these, in different sizes, and they were beginning to drive me insane. They are all (Apple devices aside) indistinguishably coloured black, making them invisible in the depths of a bag. The function of each is only discernible by either peering at tiny writing or by trial and error. So I labelled all our chargers with big capital letters using a label-maker (Amazon, £20) — the modern, digital version of what used to be Dymo Tape. I should have done it years ago.

Another oldie decision I made recently was to buy a proper corded telephone. If you share your home with children — or anyone under the age of 30 — conventional phones have become essential again. Why? Because the wretched generation which has grown up since the invention of the mobile has never grasped the idea that a phone actually belongs in a specific place. When they finish a call, the young do not return a cordless phone to its base, as we do, unthinkingly: they simply leave it lying around at random, typically down the back of a sofa.