115

Another birthday today; another year older and deeper in debt. But not much deeper, thanks to the generosity of my 3.6 Loyal Readers (and other helpful souls) in recent months; for which I am profoundly grateful.

I am claiming to be eleventy-five today, on the grounds that I was claiming to be 104 eleven years ago. That claim was based on a low, mean, degraded hankering for the praise of men. I undertook to lie about my age, not in the foolish way that some people do (mostly women, according to the stereotype, and I am sad to say that my experience does not contradict it), where one lies by pretending to be younger than one is so that one will not have to confess the mortal sin of being old. No: I decided to lie in the opposite direction, the sensible direction, so that people would compliment me on how young I looked for my age.

Sure enough, after only three years of trying, I got my reward. A young lady asked me my age, and I told her I was 107. She replied, ‘Go on! You don’t look a day over 104.’ And there was much rejoicing, but somehow not as much as I had been hoping for.

Alas, I no longer receive or merit that kind of flattery. Nowadays I fear that I resemble the character described by P. G. Wodehouse:

He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years, or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.

But there we are. I am 115 today, according to my official calculations; and if anyone objects, I can defend my figures using the finest Whale Math, as practised by the publishing industry. Twice two is 11, and 5 from 9 leaves 34; and when 900 people sign the ‘Authors United’ petition demanding that Evil Amazon give poor defenceless Hachette Livre back its lollipop, those 900 are more people than the 9,000 or so who signed the counter-petition in support of Amazon and criticizing Hachette. I wish I had known about Whale Math when I was young, all those impossible centuries and aeons ago. Then I would have taken a degree in it, instead of squandering my talents on a worthless fribble like my doctorate in Non-Cognitive Philosophy.

But this life is a vale of tears, so it is, and we seldom do the right thing in it, whether we can count or not.