Grow Up, by David Warren

I used to make myself tedious, when still a child, by giving this advice quite freely to my schoolmates: “Grow up!,” I would say.

This was when dealing with another young person who was being characteristically young. Juvenile brutishness was my preferred target.

For some reason it did not occur to me to give this advice to myself, when I was behaving as a stroppy wee tyrant. Or if it did, it passed right over my head.

To my contemporaries, or even my slight elders, this advice wasn’t plausible, when I was ten years old. It didn’t really become more plausible when I was twenty, or thirty – though I continued generous in giving it. …