DOUGLAS Dunn casts an ironic eye on St Andrews and himself in today’s sample from Second Wind, a new anthology that challenges the orthodoxies surround ageing (Saltire Society in association with the Scottish Poetry Library, £7).

PROGRESS

There they are, widows of the professoriate

Tied to their frail routines, but not unfree

Wheeling their shopping zimmers on Market Street;

And octogenarian still-cycling emeriti

Cautious of cobbles and slow-moving cars

Hunting for elusive parking spaces –

Physicists, medics, classicists, astronomers.

Gladly I yield to their seniority,

Their ancient tweeds, their wrinkled faces.

I would like to be a venerable sage,

And might be yet, if I can reach that age,

Nodding off over a Loeb in the Library

Half-way through a forgotten declension,

Defeated, yet again, by Livy’s prose.

But I gave up my bike ten years ago,

Terrified of traffic on the A91 –

And that was on the pavement. I suppose

That so-called ‘progress’ overtakes us all –

Superfast fibre, electronic bravado.

Where will it end? That’s what I want to know.

It’s years since I last saw an icicle.