What is the difference between ex- and old? I was in what they now call the Parkland Walk on New Years Day, and a young woman walking with her family said, with the voice of discovery that young people have, this is an ex-railway! I carried on walking, thinking that I would never call it an ex-railway. It is an old railway. The rails are gone, the sleepers and the clinker. There are still signs of an old platform, not much else. But in my mind it is still an old railway. There is a continuity with the past.

You may talk of an ex-wife, not an old wife. The continuity is deliberately disrupted. There is all the difference between an ex-friend and an old friend.

The young woman was using a language of discontinuity in describing the Parkland Walk. She was momentarily curious about an old identity, but her language suggested that it was not relevant to her current experience.

Nearby there is a pub called The Old Dairy. There is a pizza outlet in what used to be a bank. Old identities contribute a certain gravitas to the makeover. Or good humour at least. A public convenience has been converted to a house: it is called The Cottage.

I prefer old to ex generally speaking. It feels wrong, I admit, to talk of an old wife. I am happier to think in this instance of my first wife, as long as this does not imply a tendency to concubinage.

And I think back to the old year just gone, not as an ex-year. Without continuity it is as if we are afraid to learn, as if we have to make it up all the time, like secular creationists, according to some giant Bluffer’s Guide to the Universe.