The fact that I finally got a permanent job at 41 probably helped with the positive vibes around that.

Hot whiskies in August! Encouraging to hear that even the youth can be as grandfatherly as me. If it helps, I've noticed a pattern where I hated the end of decades - 29 and 39 were miserable - but it all passed with the turn of the decade - 31 and 41, lovely!

Oh dear, Charlie, the fact that I literally understood none of that is not helping to lessen my generalised growing old anxiety.

Indeed. To be fair, I was probably taking out my impatience with the Irish Times 'we' - a deeply annoying phenomenon - on you.

Of course, my view is shrouded in nostalgia - my cruising days were so analogue. I'm in danger of sounding like an impatient grandfather -in my day you had to get on your bike and cycle to the Brighton bushes.

I found it less thoughtful than expected, based on your intro Charlie. To my mind, they didn't stray far from a rather moralising and pathologist framework. Not arguing for simple minded celebration just more nuanced sense of distinctive pleasures and perils of cruising.

But maybe your adoption of 'we' rhetoric is symptomatic of the problem you identify? 'We', 'Ireland', 'Irish' - the proliferation of this homogenising, pseudo-psychological rhetoric across otherwise different political positions is fascinating.

Congrats, Maurice, it deserves this wider circulation.