I did it again: I pushed the wrong button and lost what I wrote. No matter. It's about my video collection, obsolete because i no longer have any means to play them. My New Year's resolution is to go through the titles, relive the movies in my mind, and toss them.The good news is that I will gain three new bookcases for all the books that keep on coming in. It's going to be a trip down memory lane (not a footpath) as I go through the films. I had a sense that I was collecting so I bought more than the current releases. Oh dear.

When I was a teenager I had a vision of some day being rich enough to have my own private screening room, and my choice of movies and special scenes I wanted to see again. And it happened without being rich. Now I have to choose again….

Fun.

Yes, well, it happens every day. Here is what I'm pondering today.

Is everyone familiar with Marilynne Robinson? Years ago she wrote a marvellous novel, Housekeeping (1980), that keeps on resonating. Then after a long hiatus she published Gilead (2003) that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Home (2008). She also writes essays and philosophy. I want to tell you about "When I Was a Child I Read Books" (2012), a collection of essays about society and I guess theology, maybe faith.

She's big on solitude, as am I. She's warm on domesticity: "At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together, make the world salubrious, savoury and warm." Yes, indeed, warm.

She also realizes the importance of silence. ( I do worry about these young people with a constant noise in their skulls from their ear buds.)

But here's what I want to explore today and for some time to come: "the frontiers of the unsayable". That's why I write. I may seem like a lightweight, I'm sure, who writes how-to, survival books and recipes, but I am always, in my mind, approaching the frontiers of the unsayable, and that's what my new book is attempting in my travel into the country of age. I'm stopping at the departure lounge but I'm on the brink of the abyss.

Oh, well, we all are.