Middle of the Road

How you approach middle-age depends on which direction you're coming from

I have been coming to the same café in Paris for the last twenty years. It is an unfussy sort of place. The tables are sticky, the wicker chairs old and the walls are barnacled with the sort of cliché film posters that should be living out their days in an undergraduate’s dorm room rather than here. And yet,I return year after year. 

It is an odd masochi…