OK so you’re Sixty. Or is it seventy? So what? What’s the difference? Yes all right, there’s ten years difference, but what does that mean? I mean really mean? It’s just a number. They’re all just meaningless numbers. Because the point is you don’t have to be old any more. Age has nothing to do with how long you’ve been on the planet any more.

Nowadays the great thing is, you’re only as old as you feel.

Think about these two men.

One of them is forty-nine and he’s depressed and his wife has left him and he hates himself because he’s never done what he wanted in life and now it’s too late and his world’s about to collapse - and all because he is nearly fifty.

The other is seventy-eight and his wife has just died. So what does he do? He decides you’re only as old as you feel, and he becomes a silver surfer and he sneaks into the over-fifties chatroom where he lies outrageously about his age and meets this amazing woman and now he’s suddenly having the best sex of his life and feels like a teenager all over again. And he’s nearly eighty!

Isn’t that a life-enhancing story?

Not for the forty-nine-year-old unfortunately, because the seventy-eight year old happens to be his Dad, and his sudden success with women only makes his son’s chronic sense of failure even worse, and to add to his woes his Mum’s hardly cold in her grave - and she’s already been replaced with this fat blowsy nurse - this truly awful woman, hideous and vulgar - and the trouble is he just finds her totally and rivetingly sexy.

He feels horribly guilty about this and tries to stop it but he can’t. And his self-loathing reaches unbearable levels because inside his head he’s now being incestuous and disloyal to his Mum - both at the same time.

I’m straying from the point.

The son is not our role model. He’s a self-pitying loser and a weirdo. No wonder his wife left him. The one whose side we’re on here is Dad, isn’t it? Because the point is that eighty is the new sixty and sixty is the new forty, and life nowadays is great for all of them.

Well isn’t it?

Of course it is. Just look around you. Joan Collins is having rampant sex with her toy boy husband and Hugh Hefner is apparently still busy doing whatever he does with his bunny girls and Michael Douglas has married the sexy one from The Darling Buds Of May and become a proper family man in his dotage.

Maybe the rest of us don’t live such remarkable lives but we do our best, we haven’t given in, and to prove it we still defiantly wear jeans – our badge of eternal youth - just like our kids do.

Which means we’re cool and happy. According to Esther Rantzen, the baby-boomer generation are now having the time of their lives - and she should know.*

(*Or should she? According to my dictionary, the baby boomer generation is from 1946 to 1964, while Esther clocked in in 1940. I mean come on, I don't want to be pedantic but sorry Esther, this is a serious attempt to deal with a very complex issue and little fibs like that don't help).

Then there’s the couple who recently got divorced in their eighties.

What does that tell you about changing attitudes to age? An optimistic, death-defying act if ever there was one.

It seems it was the wife who divorced the husband. When asked why she had done it, she said that all her husband wanted to do was watch DVDs of Heartbeat and anything with Stephen Fry in it while she wanted to travel the world and explore her inner potential.

Good for her, eh?

God what a boring stick-at-home slob he sounds, doesn’t he?! I mean come on, you’re eighty-four, get a life….

And what about the most mind-boggling news story of all, the recent announcement that Saga magazine is opening its own sexual addiction clinic?

Isn’t that amazing?

What does that say about getting old today?

Am I alone in having the guilty thought that while we all agree sexual addiction and the awful diseases that go with it really aren’t very nice, on the other hand the idea of all these thoughtlessly promiscuous oldsters busily giving everyone the clap is somehow really cheering?

I probably am alone because I just made it up. But there’s a poetic truth in there somewhere, isn’t there?

A deeper psychological truth.

Which just adds further fuel to my argument - though it really hardly needs it because we all agree it’s true anyway. “Act your age” doesn’t mean anything any more. Straightforward chronological age just no longer exists. Nowadays you really are only as old as you feel.

Or are you?


When you reach sixty the National Health Service sends you a special birthday present. This is like getting a telegram from the Queen when you reach a hundred but not so exciting.

It is, in fact, a bowel cancer testing package.

Once you have got over the shock you will see that it comprises six cardboard sticks and a rather jolly orange and white piece of cardboard with three little pairs of windows on it. The man pictured on the front of the instructions leaflet is beaming happily, probably because he hasn’t read them yet.

This is what you do. When you have a crap you dip one of the sticks into it and spread it over the first window. Then you get hold of a different bit of the same bowel movement - a highly skilled activity because you also have to make sure it hasn’t yet plopped into the toilet bowl – and quickly do the dip-and-spead trick with a second stick.

Repeat the process on the next two occasions you crap.

If you manage to survive all this, carefully place the poo-smeared windows into an envelope and send it off to Noel Edmonds or any other person you seriously detest (second-class, so it will be really rich and whiffy when it arrives).

Or you can be boring and predictable and send it to the testing place in Harrow.

This whole protracted process is clearly aimed at reminding us of our mortality, rather like those skulls in Renaissance paintings. OK, they’re telling us, we’ve given you free prescriptions and bus rides and we respect your contribution to society so much that we’re not even making you pay fines any more on your overdue library books, but don’t forget the real reason - you’ve probably already got some awful life-threatening disease and you’ll be dead very soon and no longer a disgusting burden on the rest of us - thank God.

So my NHS birthday present clearly shows that some un-PC types really don’t think you’re only as old as you feel - they genuinely believe that physical elements are of prime importance!

For these pathetically old-fashioned souls the idea of chronological age is clearly as relevant as it ever was.

One of the main aims of this guide is to help such literal-minded types to see the far more painfully complex reality. The other is to help those of us who are - shall I say - no longer quite so young to cope with the crisis of identity I sense in our midst….

Who are we?

Why are we?

Can we still wear things that say “slimline” on them and will they laugh at us if we shop at Primark?

How ridiculous, I hear the sceptics say, people have managed to get older perfectly well on their own for years without the use of self-help guides, they’re nothing but a cynical way to part the gullible from their money…

And look at it! What on earth can a flimsy smart-arsed little book like this possibly do to help the not-quite-so-young deal with their problems?!

To which the simple answer is that babies and children and their parents somehow managed to muddle along unaided until Dr Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care in 1946. Now no self-respecting parent would dare come within a hundred yards of their new-born baby until they’d read at least half a dozen childcare manuals.

Sometimes the world just doesn’t realize what it lacks until a Spock or a Freud or a Trinny and Susannah comes along and provides it.