Getting on my hobby horse

I am sixty years old and I have never had a hobby before. Well, there was this one thing you’d call a hobby and I couldn’t disagree, but I never called it that because I realise now that I regard the word as pejorative. That’s not in the way that I still remain convinced that “bucolic” is a serious illness. I believe I know what the word “hobby” means, but to me it is somehow bound up with not taking something seriously. With playing at something. Something that doesn’t matter. Writing is a hobby for many people, of course it is, but for me it’s a life. I don’t need you to think my writing is good, I need you to not see any writing as something trivial to fit in between the crossword and Sudoku. There was that one time, true. It was back in the late 1980s or possibly early 1990s, when I took a couple of lessons flying helicopters. That remains a unrequited passion, but I simply could not afford the cost at the time. Nor now, really, as we’re talking so much that I cannot find a…