And who are you? Don't puzzle me, said I.

I was a very weak, pale and clumsy child fit for nothing except to sit in a corner and read, and that set the pattern of my life. I have never worked hard, my sister says, and it is nine-tenths true; whether because of a moral fault, sloth, or because I have never felt I had much physical energy, or because of seeing my father, so enormously intelligent, working so very hard for what was or seemed an inadequate income, produced in me, as it surely did unacknowledged in him, a background feeling of hopelessness, where was the point, it wouldn't get you anywhere kind of attitude. O, well...

On the other hand, of course, how immensely fortunate I've been that my life and work have been in effect to sit in the corner and read. And how much better in any snobby sense the background I gave my (step)children, than my own, a largish, solid and substantial house of our own, more prestigious education (though really better?) than the village school, visits from and to people of decent position rather than our backstreet Bristol relatives, a civilised form of worship.

It ill becomes a man who has gone to a famous school and to Cambridge to lament the difficulties he has had. Most were inside, not outside! (Or were they? Haven't I been -- looking at my life from another point of view -- immensely fortunate/blessed, led by God and my Guardian Angel, so that I have suffered no complete and ineradicable harm despite so difficult circumstances?)

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Earlier:

Query, whether I have not spent most of my life trying to be like my father, and whether he did not spend most of his trying to be like his grandfathers? Obeying rules, unwritten and all the more powerful because unwritten, rules about how to be a good man, yes, but rules for all that. Like the Pharisees, who have had such a bad press.

You might even say, the whole purpose of life is to find your own self. You need to be naked (not so much physically, though that might well help); and

Doesn't 'gammon' mean fooling, cheating, tricking? Who were we fooling all those years? Ourselves or others? Or does this q. apply only to me?

By Dad's example, I became bookish and schoolmasterly and moral and religious.

But is that the true me?

I would have liked to have been a fulfilled artist, author or actor, even a loved teacher is that. How good it would have been to be someone whose talents and skills are valued for themselves, e.g. an AA man, or valued materially, e.g. a plumber!

Now that sexuality is fading, I realise how much I would have liked to have had so many women of different figures, ages, intelligences, races, cultures, etc., to have been a sexual scholar able to reflect and make fascinating comparisons....but then of course I would not have been my self, different fulfilments (better? happier? probably not!)

Yet one must start off from where one is put, and despite everything I regard myself as happy now and my life, ON BALANCE, as happy and fulfilled (under Heaven, thanks entirely to Judith) and feel even deeply how true is the Portuguese proverb, 'God writes straight with crooked lines'.

P.S. I regarded my sensuality and my religion as opposed (how 'chapel'!) when really, I now discover, they were mutually supporting; I often feel now at 68 that both have left me. This is not entirely true.

N.B. A possible way of looking at things: By God's blessings I am being given what I need (not what I deserve or want, what I need.) And Judith is the chief agent of that blessing; without her I would be a very lonely and bitter old man, with her I am (nearly always) cheerful, and feel no older than I must. (Though when gout strikes, that is very.)