Meanwhile, no catalogue of our time-related troubles would be complete without mentioning that alarming phenomenon, familiar to anyone older than about thirty, whereby time seems to speed up as you age – steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. It’s hard to imagine a crueller arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.