Last week’s Takimag column has our aging doctor recount for us what a literal pain it can be getting old. Our best wishes go out to Theodore Dalrymple for 2022 and beyond.

Until recently, I thought myself all but immune from the travails of age; like death itself, I believed that aging applied to others, not to myself, and was almost a sign or consequence of personal defect. But now the prospect of a severely limited life is very real to me: I have taken what the French call un coup de vieux, a blow of old age, such as I have sometimes noticed, with disapproval amounting almost to a moral judgment, in others.