" But more usually I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity. We are not especially interesting, by and large--waiting for a bus, walking along the street; younger people are busy sizing up one another, in the way that children in a park will only register other children. We are not exactly invisible, but we are not noticed, which I rather like; it leaves me free to do what a novelist does anyway, listen and watch, but with the added spice of feeling a little as though I am some observant time-traveller, on the edge of things, bearing witness to the customs of another age. "

― Penelope Lively , Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir