I wonder...

I know that, apart from dealing with hunger and thirst, which I don't really get a lot of, eating and drinking are ways to recapture the long lost pleasures of childhood. There is an image in my head from over 60 years ago, dining at my grandparents' table surrounded by family – it was the highlight of my infant week. A table full of food with my family and friends recaptures that happiness. Some, if not all, of the unnecessary grazing that I do seems to me to be an attempt to recapture that happiness and the safety that went with it. It helps to repel the anxiety that is always lurking just out of sight.

Then there are the things I habitually do, or do for no clear reason. It seems to me that a lot of them are to fill my mind and stop thoughts coming that would otherwise be unwelcome. Reminders of the many bad decisions, the host of terrible mistakes, that I've made in my life. The constant nudging into awareness of how much better I could have done, should have done, if I'd got some of those choices right. And thoughts about the distress in other people's lives that I have been responsible for. I cannot say with Edith Piaf that I have no regrets. Sometimes I find myself keeping busy for no apparent reason, and I'm pretty sure that I'm keeping that stuff away from consciousness.

The other side of that coin is the set of things that I avoid doing, things (and just occasionally, people) that I regard as thieves of my time – the few years (who knows how many, but far less than those that have already rushed, ill-used, away) that remain that I really want to cram so much into. I have more books than I can do justice to, more ideas to assimilate and understand, more pushing to do against the boundary of my ignorance. Right now shopping calls, but there is a new book I've hardly started and several I have not yet finished, all dealing with things I think are important and that I want to get a better handle on. And as well as those ideas, there are places to go, old friends to visit, views to enjoy, times to share and new people to meet.

So let's get on with it...