Considering the Useless Sage Stage.

You know how it is. You’ve been working one way or another all day, and the last job you began over an hour ago is proving to be such a pain that you’ve decided to leave it half done and finish it tomorrow. (You've also discovered that the painful wrist which you contracted two autumns ago, and which you thought was history, is back, courtesy of the job you just half-did.) It’s now 8pm. The evening air is warm and mellow, the evening sun is still bestowing its beneficence through a light veil of diaphanous cloud, and so you decide to call it a day.

You make a cup of tea, grab something to nibble, and go outside to enjoy the peace and pleasantness of it all. Just as you’re settling into your plastic chair (which came free with the house when I moved here), you remember a final job which can’t, or shouldn’t, be left.

I do it nearly every day, you know. There are jobs demanding my attention everywhere and I’m faced with the decision as to which to do and which will have to be left. And nearly every day I forget at least one of the more urgent jobs until after I’ve gone into relaxation mode. It’s very trying.

I suppose it’s just one of the trials of ageing. I’m told that I should welcome advancing years and luxuriate in the growing capacity for wisdom which they say it brings in its wake. Well, maybe I would if only somebody could explain to me what possible benefit the faculty of becoming wise confers. Nobody has managed it so far.