According to research undertaken by Stanford Medicine in 2024, adult human beings are subject to two “massive biomolecular shifts” – spikes in ageing, in other words – one at 44 and another at 60, confirming what most of us instinctively know to be true: that we get older in jagged bursts – not with gentle, steady progression. As the new year issues its annual invitation to stocktake, the thing I keep thinking is where we might place the equivalent emotional pivot points, those periods in which, after years of – God willing! – pottering along feeling roughly the same, suddenly, one day, there’s a change.

I bring this up because I seem to be in the middle of one, an inflection point that manifests in the number of times on the walk back from the school drop-off I stop to look at a bird in a tree, or a snail on a wall, or any number of other overwrought visual metaphors that allow me to feel momentarily like I’m inside a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hard to put one’s finger........

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