Making the most of maturity, as seen through orange tinted glasses

ITHINK I could get used to this aging business. Never mind the hair loss or the difficulty pulling on socks. Never mind the stiffness of joints or the dodgy dentures. Never mind the appalling state of pop music or the lack of taste in the beer. For those of us still able to get about despite the gathering years, there are compensations.

We enjoyed a family holiday recently, jetting off to London for a short break. God be with the benighted days when the ferry ports of Dun Laoghaire or Rosslare were first stop for most travellers en route for England. The stomach heaving voyage across the Irish Sea was followed by an equally vomit-inducing exploration of the motorways on a coach. Or maybe there was a seat on in a train carriage, in those long gone days before British Rail became a privatised Virgin.

As I tried to explain to Eldrick and young Persephone, there was a time when air travel was the preserve of the rich. Now, the affordable flight from Dublin to Southend lasted scarcely an hour. A train appeared promptly to whisk us away on landing and, a mere hour later, we arrived in the metropolis in a state fit to begin our assault on the sights of the city.

First stop on our bespoke London tour was the observatory at Greenwich, which houses an attractive museum specialising in astronomy and the pursuit of longitude. We bustled up to the turnstile, all eager to learn why Greenwich Mean Time is so called and to straddle the line separating East from West. We gleefully exploited the menu of admission charges to the full.

Young Persephone was young enough to qualify for the youth rate. Eldrick, with his bi-focals, looked studious enough to qualify for the student rate. Hermione, in the full bloom of her glorious womanhood, could not escape the full rate. But, lo and behold, the eyesight of her antiquated spouse was sharp enough to spot that a senior rate was available.

I whipped out my passport to prove that I was indeed over 60 (if only by a year or two) and entitled to discount. This spared the official in charge the embarrassing business of querying how someone so evidently well preserved could in fact be so very, very old. Cheered at saving a whole pound sterling, I then skipped around the exhibition with all the energy of a spring lamb, bunions completely forgotten. It quite brought out the child in me.

We oldies, I muse, are discriminating and adventurous souls, endowed with a taste for the finer things in life – things which may elude those who come after us. I refer specifically to marmalade.

We returned from our vacation to find that the Seville oranges were available at a selection of discriminating greengrocers and supermarkets. It was time to unearth the preserving pan from its hibernation in the attic of the Manor and make up a muslin bag to hold the pith and pips. It was time to sterilise the jam jars, print off the labels and dig around in the archive to find my late mother’s handwritten recipe. Seven of the Seville oranges, two sweet oranges, a couple of lemons and a small mountain of sugar, along with seven pints of water, are all that is required to concoct the sweetest, tangiest breakfast preserve.

Persephone came home from school to find me chopping up peel. She was polite enough to ask me what I was doing before retreating to her room to spend time on her eyebrows.

Eldrick looked around the kitchen door as I was tying up the muslin bag. He said nothing but rolled his eyes and disappeared.

The process of boiling the jam was under way and a wondrous citrus scent wafted from the hob when Hermione at last materialised. As she heaved two massive bagloads of shopping onto the table, her steely gaze penetrated the cloud of steam to take in the array of bowls and knives and bags and graters and jars littering the counter.

I greeted my wife of twenty years with puppy-dog enthusiasm, planting a slobbery kiss on her cheek and asking when she was going to have a go at making a batch herself.

‘Oh, Medders, haven’t you noticed?’ was her reply. ‘I don’t eat marmalade.’

She is very young yet.