One of the great treats of this mouse’s year is my annual walk with old friends. This is an all-male group and comprises a novelist, poet, photographer, civil servant, structural engineer and a nature writer. None of us seems to have changed much since we were young, despite nearly 40 years of work, children, marriage and, in some cases, therapy. The Graham Greene line in The Comedians is true: ‘For writers it is always said that the first 20 years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation.’ No, we have not changed our characters, but we have matured in some ways. Old friends, many wits have observed, seem to get better and better, like wine. Charles Kingsley wrote ‘better is old wine than new, and old friends likewise’. In She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith has Mr Hardcastle declare to his wife Dorothy, ‘I love...
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