Saturday 4th January

One has a perception of oneself that is slightly removed from reality.  Most of the time you don’t even feel that old.  Okay, you don’t want to break into a run every few minutes, but apart from the odd ache when you’ve been sitting too long in the same position, you don’t feel that different to when you were fifty, or forty or thirty even.

I can still answer most of the general knowledge questions on Mastermind, and even University Challenge which used to appear to be broadcast in a foreign language completely has some questions I can answer.  Eggheads is a doddle, until it comes to more recent popular culture.  At work I am seldom flummoxed, the work is pretty easy, and even when there is a glitch I can sort it out.

But when you are feeling down, or have a cold or are carrying an injury, suddenly the world closes in, and you feel very small and frail and old.  So, what exactly is old?  It is more than anything a perception, brought on or triggered by physical ailments or limited strength.  Funnily enough although I stare at my face every morning when shaving, it is only in photographs that I think I look old, and I am always surprised at my photographic image.  Surely I don’t look like that at all; why, the man in the photo actually looks old – that can’t be me surely.

Then I look at my Mum and Dad, and those faces, so familiar to me, look really old.  Even my children in photo’s look older than I remember them.  It is only the lovely happy smiling faces of the grandchildren that still offer the unblemished hope of youth.

I don’t wish to sound maudlin’ but I may realistically have only twenty good years left.  Though in reality none of us knows.  I find it particularly depressing reading of contemporaries of mine who have died in their early sixties, it suddenly brings you back to earth and you realise your own impregnability is just an illusion.  Like most of life itself.