STRETCHING THE TRUTH

JOCASTA AND I are sitting at the kitchen table. My wife has decided to calculate my body mass index (BMI) so she will know, based on the ratio of my height to my weight, whether I should lose some weight. "How tall are you?" she asks.

- Richard Glover

With a slight swagger of pride, I supply the required figure. Immediately, she disputes it.

"Well, you used to be 185 centimetres, but you haven't had your height measured for years," she says. "People get shorter as they get older. I'm going to knock off five centimetres, maybe 10." Jocasta often comes up with these scientific observations. In her career as a screenwriter, she has written a couple of medical dramas and now lives under the misapprehension that she's a doctor.

"The discs in your spine settle over the years," she continues. "By the time you get to 90, you're basically half the height you used to be." I find this hard to believe. "If that were true," I tell her, "people would need to lower their kitchen countertops as they get older."

Jocasta sighs, as one might do when dealing with a recalcitrant child. "By that age, people have been doing things for so long, they don’t need to have a direct view of every task,” she says. “If they want to make toast, they do it by touch.”