Sometimes at the height of my agitation I wonder what it would taste like if I were to bite into the sticky-fingered fabrication called time. Would taste as sour as the acrimony its passage through me evokes? Or would it mock my aging failing taste buds with the succulence and sweetness of a virgin kiss?

There was a time when I was a lad, rascally and carefree, when I would have without a moment’s hesitation and should the whim have struck me so, leapt from this window of my elderly cell one floor above ground to the grass below. For it was a fact then that the Bermuda green besieged by the multitudes of clover would have risen and cradled me safely to the expectant earth.

But you, the tireless marauding bandit ambushed me as I strolled along unaware and you deftly stole the black in my hair and burdened my mischief with caution.

There was a time when I was a lad, rambunctious as ever, when I would have never spent my day sunning at this window, numb to the splendour of cascading greenery spotted with pastel coloured white-roofed houses and a sky as such that the word blue was deficient. I would have answered the call of the interminable garrulous ocean in the distant horizon.

I would not have found it gratifying to watch her below as she thumbed her way through our garden shaping the hedges and turning the soil. And I surely would have found it criminal and downright absurd if she had bent over as she is now not to have her right then and there where the rose bushes, fed up with our impertinence would claw at our skin.

But you, the irreversible river, have run us through both. Her once irresistible buttock and my indomitable appetite for it you carried out to sea and sunk, without much ceremony or grand revelry.

It passes just as you do, my agitation does. And I become another old man sunning by the window as his industrious wife below prepares the bed in which he will sleep.

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