my view of age, she says half-wonderingly, is completely distorted by being in school for so long. on the one hand your primary models in life are professors, so you think that sixty is the natural age for a human being to be. on the other you're so out of step with your peers - who seem to be at a different stage of life altogether - trailing spouses and mortgages, and that gets translated into panic about being old help, old old i am old. and when you see an undergraduate you think, hah! teenager! if 22 is infantile and 50 is middle-aged and mid-career how is it that 27 is old, old, way past the expiry date for both intellectual approval and active lifespan? how is it that we internalise this inconsistency so easily? years ago, i remember k's father saying to me, about my mother's plans to get a masters, this was when my mother was 50, that at her age, if i didn't mind him saying, that was only for fun, not to use. and i remember sitting at the back of the car, suppressing the surge of annoyance, because one couldn't snap at one's boyfriend's parents, though i ought to have. because my mother happens to think that 50 means that she still has a good twenty years of active life ahead, and that a second career would be just the thing to take stock of her accomplishments, skills and experience, and to put them to good use in a new field. i shall resist the ridiculous idea that i am old, and i won't, i won't i won't subscribe to the conventional scheme, may they prosper who do, but why need i? 27 is a good age to be, and a good time to, like my mother did at 50, reassess my talents, inclinations and energies, and to dare to try what i shall.