poetry

I believe I am right in saying that \”ageing gracefully\” is an oxymoron?

The sound of a rabbit screaming in the night as it is taken by a fox must be one of the worst sounds in the world. As bad as the sounds of any sentient being caught in any lethal and inescapable trap.

A sure sign of old age is that, in filling out a form or a survey with age categories, one automatically places a tick in the lowest box (\”65 and over\”) without needing to think about it. There are no lower categories.

Comment fields on internet sites never have an edit function. Once you have clicked \”Submit\” there is no opportunity to correct errors, improve grammatical structure, turn le bon mot into les plus bon mots, change half truths into full truths, reverse the sequence of sentences, spell Samuel Johnston without the t. Whatever you have written becomes engraved

Some people seem born old. For others, whatever age they have reached – 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 – seems impossibly old for them. It goes without saying, of course, that you yourself are one of the latter class.

Scribbly gums, scribbling people, Brittle gums, brittle people, Mountain Ashes to ashes.

Talk to anyone with a long career in showing dogs, sheep, goats, chickens, cattle, cats, guinea pigs, pigs, budgerigars, canaries, pigeons, alpacas, horses, and anything else that some agricultural show somewhere in Australia has a section for, and you get the same story. A tale, like a Greek odyssey, involving every triumph, every judge that