Shrinktime

An odd experience the other day, a new sort of senior moment, slightly modified in what follows.

I used to be a very keen stamp collector which meant that I could not pass a stamp shop - like the one in the Strand - without poring over the contents of the window and quite possibly going in. Quite possibly making a purchase. Certainly keeping a sharp eye out at car booters for the odd collection being slung out with the rest of the junk from grandpa's loft. So stamps were very important to me and while I am not as keen as I was, the buzz is still there. Until the day before yesterday that is, when I passed a stamp shop without a flicker. I saw the shop, knew that it had once meant something, but at that moment it meant nothing at all. The whole business was just absent and there was a clear sense of loss, of contraction, of shrinkage even. However, there is hope, as once home, I turned the pages of my most important album to a glass of Johnny Walker and it all came flooding, or at least trickling, back.

I am reminded of once being told by a widow of some years standing that her late husband had become no more than someone whom she had once known, with the suggestion being that any feelings she might have once had, had more or less gone. I was quite taken aback that someone whom one had known very well could fade to that extent - but it seems that the same sort of thing can happen to my stamps. Also reminded of a chap from TB who told me that he had more or less lost his sense of taste, that he still took on the lager as it made him feel good when the active ingredient got going, but there was no pleasure in the act of drinking itself.

Rounded out the shrinkery by taking a test this afternoon for something called 'locus of control', a personality trait invented by one J. B. Rotter in 1966, with the locus being on an 11 point scale between 0 (internal) and 10 (external), with external, for example, meaning that you believed that your life was more or less under the control of external agents, rather than yourself. The test consisted of 13 pairs of statements and the instruction was 'click on the button next to the one statement that best describes how you feel'. I think one could cheat easily enough and click the question to push the score towards your preferred outcome, but answering honestly was not so easy as most of the time I did not agree much with either statement. One pair was, for example, 'the idea that teachers are unfair to students is nonsense' and 'most students don't realize the extent to which their grades are influenced by accidental happenings'. But I managed, coming out at the end with a score of 5, so comfortably sitting on the fence where I can attend to my stamps.