I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Just to correct a vicious, vindictive hate campaign in the comments, while today is indeed my birthday, it is number thirty-two, not the forty proposed by the privately-educated (and thus spiritually and emotionally crippled) forty-something Hallam. As noted this time last year, 1977 was the year of my birth, not the far inferior 1969.

So, to celebrate me having eight years up my sleeve until the dreaded forty, here is a photo of myself, a battered fit and broken down healthy old young man with two little rapscallions in either arms and a duck just behind as I shift past Brian Epstein, Bruce Lee, Mama Cass Elliot, Karen Carpenter and Keith Moon in the years spent alive column.