Today was (and indeed remains) Mrs Burnett’s birthday – an unfortunate clash of professional requirements (I was working) meant that we didn’t get to spend the day together, but I did get to hear her crashing through the house while she got ready to go out.

They’re funny things, birthdays, especially the older you get. I’ve never cared for them particularly – just sitting around getting older doesn’t feel like a particular achievement, and we all have enough of a sense of self-preservation that there’s no skill in having done so. There are any number of people older than me, though I guess if I hung on long enough I might find myself in that excessively exclusive club where you’re the single oldest person on the entire planet.

Not that I would want to be, mind, but the odds aren’t exactly stacked in my favour, not the way I eat. I don’t mind my age as a number as long as there’s some reasonable consensus that I don’t look as old as I actually am. While I type Mrs Burnett is engaged in a passive aggressive fight with the cat over the space on her side of the bed (the cat’s), which is proof if it were needed that age brings you no privilege.