Sideswipe: November 11: An optimist with a blue pen passes by ...

Sanguine patisserie.

Advice for the younger generation

The cost-of-living crisis is worsening, and young people will bear the brunt. Here is 68-year-old Roy Hobbs’ advice to see them through it:

Live at home until you get married: I never worried about bills until I was 27 because I was still sharing a bedroom with my two brothers. I handed over my pay packet to my mother and she kept most, put a little by and gave me ten and six back for toffees and the cinema. Eat stodge: There were none of these pan-Asian flash-fried avocado brunch pizzas when I was a lad. We ate stodge, and plenty of it. What was it? Stodge. I think suet was involved, meat, certainly potatoes, vegetables to a degree but not to the point you could identify them. Good honest stodge. Three meals a day. Be born in a more sensible year: Look at their dates of birth these days. “2002″ and “1995″. What bollocks. Get yourself a nice sensible birth year, like 1954 or 1968, and you won’t have all this trouble. Enjoy the postwar boom, get yourself a nice cheap house, final salary pension, retire. But the young today would rather be modern and cool.

Anyone can put out a self-help book these days

With a foreword by Donkey.

American crowbar case

In 1848, an explosion propelled a 3-metre long, 5.5kg tamping iron through the skull of the Phineas Gage, a railway construction foreman. The object skewered Gage’s head, puncturing his left cheek, passing behind his left eye, ripping through his prefrontal lobe, and erupting clear through the crown. His survival was miraculous. By all accounts, however, he was not the same. Though intellectually intact, with a grip on his memories, he was transformed from a friendly man into someone ornery and rude with few inhibitions. (His personality reportedly returned to normal after a couple of years.) Supposedly, he carried the iron rod that tore through his brain wherever he went until he died from a seizure 12 years later. The “American crowbar case” became one of several critical points in the evolutionary timeline of the lobotomy.