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 helicopter school that will tell me the price for a real flying course. They just want to sell you what they call trial lessons which they then describe instead as an experience that gets you a certificate. I don’t want a certificate. Why would I want a certificate? I was given one once for having visited the Grand Canyon and I felt it was possible that I’d remember being there without a piece of paper telling me, and I also felt it was just about possible that to get recognition you should do more than pay and turn up.

Anyway, purported trial lessons are now around £250 for half an hour and I know real lessons are less because for those you only pay for rotor time, the time that the helicopter’s rotors are turning. Much of the time at first is classroom-based which sounds boring but is at least cheaper.

Okay, there’s also the fact now that as well as having to up my bank balance in order to fly helicopters, I’d have to significantly lower my flying weight.

If I do that now, and when I did it back then, I don’t see how you could call this anything other than a hobby. I’m not planning to be a pilot for a living, I wasn’t especially planning to fly anyone anywhere, I wanted it for the utter joy of it. To fly is human, to hover is divine.

That, though, was the sole thing in my entire life where I had something I enjoyed doing and I was not able to make it part of my work. I’ve considered that fortunate — not lucky, never lucky, because it doesn’t happen by chance — but it does also mean that I have nothing, I do nothing, that isn’t work.

Except that since about March I’ve been learning to play piano.

It’s the same as helicopters in that there is no possibility I’ll play at Symphony Hall, plus I don’t actually have any interest in playing professionally. One of the first things my teacher asked me was why I wanted to learn, whether I was looking to play some favourite tunes by memory, or do the whole sight-reading thing. I do not comprehend why anyone would want to learn to play piano but not actually learn to play piano. Someone who would want to play at playing piano. I only want it because piano is the best instrument and I want the joy of playing it for myself, but I take it as seriously as if it were a job.

After a little while, incidentally, the second thing my piano teacher asked me was whether I might consider the triangle instead. So I’m not any good on piano — though compared to how I was at the start, I’m amazing — and I didn’t fly for long enough to become any good.

They are hobbies. No question.

I need to get over my problem with that word. And now I need to get over how I appear to have told you that I’m 60, boring and too fat for even military aircraft.