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"It can't fall - there's nothing to stop it."

"We can't hurry: there's no time."

These aphorisms have been handed down in my family since some time in the sixties. The punctuation is uncertain, because they were never written down. They were part of the oral culture, the teetering that was our day to day experience.

There's nothing to stop it, so it can't fall.

There's no time to hurry.

When you read them this way round you begin to see how the PARADOX
STATES THE TRUTH. It's too late even to hurry. If it falls, it
falls, but it mustn't.

It's almost worse than fatalism.

In later life, indulging in some hopeless expedition into the land of DIY, I would hear my son (about four at the time) asking "are you doing the best that you can?" and "have you hurt yourself yet?", so I can see that the focus of the new generation has shifted.

One of his finest was to stop me in Sainsbury's and ask - brow
furrowed with the weight of philosophical pondering - "Daddy, how do
you get old?". People tell me I should have used a witty putdown such as "have kids, kid!", but I could do no better than the pointlessly profound and true "you just wait".

Then there was number two son, who called his mother "simple, but
'fective".

I always return to the basic truth I discovered one night in
Reading...

Life is a potato behind a rock in the desert.