Where’s Wally? …mocking me.

I have a theory.

I have established that the ability to find Wally in the books ‘Where’s Wally’ (or for those Americanised souls among us, Waldo in ‘Where’s Waldo’) slowly but surely deteriorates with every year we live.

I say this because I used to be great at it, but I find that as I grow older, it takes me longer and longer to find that annoyingly stripy little man. Now I know you may dismiss my troubles, putting it down to lack of interest or something else just as, if not more, trivial and ordinary.

But, this is wrong. For a start, I’m incredibly competitive so when my seven-year-old cousin challenges me to a game of ‘who can find Wally first’, I want to win. Forget the fact that as the older and wiser (clearly not when it comes to finding Wally though) of us I should be nice and let her win so as to avoid upset - something I often do, yet am always happy knowing in my own little mind that I’ve won, an idea from which I get a worryingly large sense of pleasure. But this time, I just couldn’t find Wally! And when I handed my baton over to my brother, he had even more trouble than me. The book was then passed from person to person within our family; uncles, aunts, sons, grandmothers, the whole shebang. Through the careful observation of these many different people of many different ages attempting to find Wally, I have come to the conclusion that the older one is, the harder the quest for Wally.

And that, is why Wally always wears that smug little grin that you only begin to notice once you pass the age of thirteen and becomes more and more obvious and more and more mocking with every year you age.

And to be honest, the hat’s just silly.