The oldest thirty-something in town.

As I watch my hairline sweep backwards across my head as if it were mortally afraid of my nose, and see my students ask that dreaded question "Who?" when I mention Wilson, Keppel and Betty, I begin to see something of the love affair that the world has with the young.

The epithet beauty is almost exclusive to the young, and there is a good reason. We watch their vitality, freshness, newness, and see our old ideas beget new thoughts in their heads. In each young man and woman there is a power and a potentiality that we find frightening.

It's easy for us to be filled with twinges of regret and envious loathing as they remind us of the southward drift of the stomach and the stiffening of the joints that result in pistol shots emanating from under the cassock every time we genuflect.

The love affair with the young is vicarious in nature, we can live our hopes and dreams through our sons and daughters and yet we can forget that they are people in themselves. None more so is this evident with the sexualising of the young by a desperate society trying to stave off the ravages of time with more and more impossibly handsome young men and women. Society has forgotten that sexuality is the beginning of life for someone else: it is not something for the individual to possess, not a pleasure to indulge in, not for ourselves as a pastime.

This attraction that exists is a desire to possess and to live one's life over again, trying to mend all those faults that we have incurred, trying to find pleasures that we have now lost. I see so many children cleverer than I am/was, and it's a shocker to see that the intellect that I was once proud to possess eclipsed by my students. Do I regret it?

No. Not one bit. It is sobering, but "at the end of the game, all the pieces have to go back in the box" as John Ortberg says. So it is pointless to dwell on past glories. We have to be prepared for this, and allow these youngsters to play their game - use their time and chance to make this world better. To steal time from them is vanity and a form of violation. Nonetheless, we do have a duty to help them avoid the pitfalls that caught us, to help them exercise and train their skills and encourage them into thinking new thoughts built upon the foundations of the old.

My only hope is that they are shown that true life is not something that can be taken apart and analysed, but rather a God-given gift given to each one of us to do with what we will, and that also comes with responsibilities and duties, for they too will reach this stage with half a life lived and wonder, as I do, "where has it all gone?"

What about for us whose life is half lived?

Well, there is still the other half to go...