ON TUESDAY, the day before Sri Lanka’s president announced his country’s economic collapse, the same day British railway workers started their first national strike in 30 years (over a lower-than-inflation pay rise), British PM Boris Johnson began encouraging Tory MPs to support eliminating caps on City executive pay and bonuses.

FATHER’S DAY falls this Sunday but I’ve already had the best possible rise out of it: for five days last week, both my adult children were at home. My son returned to London last Thursday, my daughter will at month-end. But every second with them both was magical. We are all on the long and winding road that leads to we all know where (even if some us hope and pray it ends somewhere else). I am farther down the road and love to turn and watch them run, dance and leap down it.

READING HAS SAVED my life all my life. Today, it might be a book like Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs that encourages me to keep repositioning nose to grindstone but, since before I was ten, books have always realigned me. I can chart my development as a reader (and, ergo, writer) by the books that blew me away (and the rough age I was when I read them):

The Call of the Wild (11). Kidnapped (12). Great Expectations (13). Miguel Street (14). Animal Farm, 1984, A House for Mr Biswas, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (15). Catch-22, Don’t Stop the Carnival (16). Slaughterhouse Five, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird (17). The Lonely Londoners, Lord of the Flies, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, L'Etranger (18). Things Fall Apart, Gulliver’s Travels, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Brighton Rock (19). Crime and Punishment, The Wide Sargasso Sea, Moby Dick, The Dragon Can’t Dance (20). Midnight’s Children, Les Miserables, Of Mice and Men, Heart of Darkness (21). The Red and the Black, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Something Happened, Anna Karenina, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (22).

YESTERDAY WAS was my birthday and all I’ve got to show for myself after six decades of this cosmic joke called life is the same receding hairline, expanding waistline, infrequent byline and recurring firetrucking punch line: ten times before today, in “birthday” columns, I’ve repeated the same hairline/ waistline/ byline joke I first made when I was 30 with a Bullet.