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.