When you are small, all ambitions fall into one grand category: when I'm grown up. When I'm grown up. You say, I'll go up in space. I'm going to be an author. I'll kill them all and then they'll be sorry. None of it ever happens, of course, or very little but the fantasies give you the idea that there is something to grow up for. Indeed one of the saddest things about golden youth is the feeling that from eighteen on, it is all downhill a determination to be better adults than the present job-takers is fine, but to refuse to grow up at all is just plain unrealism. Right, so then you get some of what you want, or something like it, or something that will do all right, and for years you are too busy to do more than live in the present and put one foot in front of the other your goals stretching little beyond the day when the boss has a stroke or the moment when the children can bring you tea in bed and the later moment when they actually bring you hot tea, not mostly slopped in the saucer. However, I have now discovered an even sweeter category of ambition. When my children are grown up... When my children are grown up, I'll learn to fly a plane. I will career round the sky, knowing that if I do 'go pop' there will be at least no little ones to suffer shock and grief that even if the worst does come, I'll at least escape a long stay in hospital and all that looking for your glasses in order to see where you've left your teeth. When the children are grown up I'll actually be able to do a day's work in a day, instead of spreading over three, and go away for a weekend without planning as if for a trip to the moon. When I'm grown up--when they're grown up--I'll be free. Of course. I know it is not to get worse before it gets better. Twelve-year-old, I'm told, don't go to bed at seven, so you don't ever get your evenings once they're past ten you have to start worrying about their friends instead of simply shooting the intruders off the doorstep. Of course, you've got even more to worry about. What interests the writer about the young is that they ______.