And that era when it was the king of the hill wasn't some distant age - it was just maybe three or four years ago.
School runs and any after-school activities are difficult to dove-tail with children of very distant ages.
Pick clean, licked smooth, dried by the wind, it might have been a portion of a fossil from a distant age.
In that distant age of feudal warfare, there must have been a great demand for his skill.
But the recent star search felt especially painful when compared to last year's awards, which already seem to belong to some distant golden age.
On parchment rolls and in books they were made accessible to distant ages.
Read today, "Open Marriage" is a period piece, a window onto a distant age of experimentation and abandon.
They were obviously reptiles of some sort, left over from a distant age of this Dimension.
These names give us an indication of the habitat of the region during this distant age.
What more revealing way could there be to peer into the mind of a distant age?