OLD TIMER

It's gone a bit cooler and a bit breezier today. There's even a rumour that we might get rained on tomorrow.

Just in time to drench that twenty-foot baby balloon they're planning on floating over London in protest at a visiting President.

I don't talk about politics, but I think it's okay to say that you ought not to fight peurile with peurile. Sure, President Business has a character like something from The Beano, and his thin-skinned behaviour leaves a lot to be desired. But even the least qualified of us know that you can't change a child's behaviour by behaving like a child. As Michelle Obama observed once, "When they go low, we go high," by which I don't think she meant a giant effigy bobbing above the Houses of Parliament like a barrage balloon. I think that what they are doing is actually a really childish reaction to a pretty grim situation, and there are much more grown up ways to protest about things you don't like. Sorry if that's not in the zeitgeist, but I say, bring on the rain.

Meanwhile, closer to home, I got called an 'old timer' today.

"Matt, you're an old timer..." said someone (meaning I've been doing the same thing for six years). I reacted, and so they said it again... and then four further times, just to elicit a face that unfortunately I couldn't hide.

Eyebrows raised, look of horrified indignation, open-mouthed in over-dramatised shock...

Old timer indeed! When I was a kid that was a phrase for someone who fought in the War! And before you dream up a wisecrack, I of course mean the Second World War and not as you might have thought, The Boer, Napoleonic, or Hundred Years' War thank you.

"I'm a young man!" I protested to Clive, looking around for sympathy.

"Of course you are," he chuckled into his monitor.

Some of the students looked puzzled as if they couldn't quite compute what was happening. The only consolation I had was knowing that one day, their time would come too. Weirdly, that deferrable schadenfreude brought me a little 'freude', a long time before there would be any 'schaden' for them to understand.

Young, old, left, right, liberal, conservative. Sometimes I really despise the way that society pushes us into polarised boxes. All we end up doing is standing in ours, shouting about how hypocritical the people in the others are. And as soon as a completely divisive character comes along, the shouting just gets louder, and it gets harder and harder to really listen to what's going on.

But then, I suppose it's possible that my hearing is going; I am an 'old timer' after all.