I'm now older than my maternal grandfather was when I was born, and he was the oldest thing on earth. He was quiet, slow, affable, tolerant, and a limitless source of cigarette smoke.
Born in 1895, he signed up for World War I in the hope of adventure. And he got it. Instead of being packed off to the trenches to die in the mud he was sent to East Africa. Both the British and Germans had colonies there and stationed troops to guard them, but there was almost no fighting.
So the couple of years that my grandfather spent in the British Army were the highlight of an otherwise uneventful life. Such are the ironies of time.
So taken with Kenya, indeed, was my grandfather that he was keen to stay there, and had he done so he would have lived a life that precluded the existence of that arbitrary product of chance and genetics, me. However, he was already engaged to be married in England so back he came.
He was not to know, of course, that his enchanting fiancée would turn into a wife both cruel and self-pitying - and I have that on my mother's authority. We like to think we steer our little lives, but when we look back we see that almost everything is time and chance. We're tossed on currents over which we have no control.
At 63 my grandfather wore a cheap brown suit with a waistcoat and braces and lace-up shoes. I wear elasticated trousers from the Warehouse, and Crocs. His belly was round. So's mine. He was bald. I am bald. I have two eyes. He had only one. I never asked what happened to the other one because he was old and therefore of no interest. Now I am old and therefore of no interest.
A man who used to run the local branch of Age Concern once told me the definition of old: it was your own age plus 15. So a 48-year-old sees me as a fossil. And you have to be 78 before I think of you as an old person.
It works the other way round as well. Any 78-year-old reading these words will be wondering what this whippersnapper is complaining about, though I am not, as it happens, complaining. I am merely expressing wonder. Wonder at time's stealth.
The century that I feel I belong to was the 20th and it's fast becoming ancient history. Adult human beings exist who never set foot in it. The 21st century, meanwhile, is already 20 per cent done with and there are children around already who will live into the 22. Time's a whizz.
My grandfather was born 62 years before me. If we assume a consistent interval between generations then his grandfather was born several years before the Treaty of Waitangi. And that grandfather's grandfather witnessed both the French and American revolutions. Yesterday's far closer than we imagine it.
And so's tomorrow. When I was a kid there was a television programme called Tomorrow's World the subject of which was the technological marvels of the future. The dates at which these marvels would materialise and transform our lives were always frustratingly remote.
Well now, those dates have pretty well all been and gone and many of the marvels - I remember microwave ovens, mobile phones, home computers - have duly entered our lives. And how much transforming have they done? Precisely.
The things that preoccupy me - love and money, mostly, and their correlatives - are the things that preoccupied my grandfather and his grandfather and his.
There's nothing new in these truths. But the only way to learn them is to live them, and the only medium in which to live them is time, and time runs out on each of us. It's the oldest and best joke. You have to laugh.
