Englishmen, in my experience, go about it in a far less irascible way. They assume, or maybe they’re taught from birth, that any job carries with it daily stretches of boredom. So they jog along for thirty, forty years and patter off sweetly or seedily into an inadequate pension, and then they are galvanized into doing what they’ve secretly wanted to do: to catch butterflies, collect stamps or book matches, read all of Trollope or grow turnips. An old lady wrote to me a year or so ago from Dorset, a lady plainly engrossed in her singular hobby. `My retirement,’ she wrote, `which came in my sixty-fifth year, has made it possible for me to pursue my hobby: to catch The Sound of Music wherever it is being shown. Sometimes I sit through all three performances. So far, I’ve seen it seventy-nine times, and I hope the end is not yet.’

INFORMATION:

Biographical information about Alistair Cooke is on-line at http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/C/htmlC/cookealista/cookealista.htm. 

ORDER THIS AUTHOR'S WORKS ON-LINE: