My eighty-first birthday this week. Ran my birthday mile in 8 minutes 27 seconds – disappointing but at least that’s ten seconds faster than last year’s pathetic effort. Extrapolating this improvement in a way that some may find questionable, I calculate that I should be down to a respectable four minutes by the time I am a hundred and eight. Watch this space.

Meanwhile I thought that as it’s my birthday week I might be excused for offering a poem of my own, a meditation on what is lost with age, and what can still be kept.

Journal

I write in my journal, ‘Thrushes in the lane,
A soft wind, and the blackthorn petals falling.’
There would have been much more when I was young:
Each scent of earth, each bird and flower of spring,
But youth is gone, I cannot visit again
The adventure of the blackbird’s first song.

And once, I might have wanted to share such words
But now it seems enough that they are for me,
And in time, if time allows, will quicken this day,
Since love, in the end, needs little for memory,
But makes of petals, soft winds, singing birds,
Its momentary, everlasting stay.

David Sutton