Middle-age has its compensations. You feel no need to do what you do not like. You are no longer ashamed of yourself you are reconciled to being what you are, and you do not much mind what people think of you.

Writer Somerset Maugham, after his parents deaths, spent a few stultifying years in his uncle's vicarage. Later, in his teens at a boarding-school, having lost his belief in the existence of God said: The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God, but on the fear of hell, tumbled down like a house of cards.