You know this: the more elderly someone is, the smaller their world becomes. There’s a practical reason in that at aged 100, you’re unlikely to go late-night limbo dancing, or at least not on a whim. But mentally, too, what’s in sight becomes an obsession and what is not, is dismissed.

It’s not a happy thing to witness but it was pointed out to me this week that it’s normal, that if I live that long, there will come a point when the same thing happens to me. There will come a point when my entire world collapses down into just myself and what is happening to me. I shuddered and asked if it could at least shrink down to someone else instead.

But here’s a thing. Yesterday I was in a school working with writers aged between 7 and 9. Writers and a toy rabbit. It’s quite hard to be serious when someone is balancing a rabbit on your head. And it’s now very hard to know what to do when a crowd of 8-year-olds start hugging you.

Anyway.

They were fun and clever and they wrote well, it was great. Only, watching them, seeing hundreds of other children going by, and trying to be useful talking to groups in the school library, I did wonder about whether their world was small. There’s a practical thing in that they’re not going to drive to the late-night limbo centre. But mentally, too, I’m wondering whether the fact that they seemed to be interested in everything is more that they couldn’t stay on any subject for long.

I wonder whether we start off with a small world and we end with one. I’m wondering whether we start being self-obsessed to the exclusion of everything else, and whether we end that way too.

It’s hard not to then also wonder whether we aren’t really like this for our whole lives and we just don’t see it.

And yet right now, everything is interesting, everything is exciting.

Obviously except football.