Can I really be turning 80?

A princess of Hanover wrote in her diary: ‘My 30th birthday. There must be some mistake.’ Substitute 30th for 80th and you have how I feel this week. But age is all relative, being dependent on your genes, immune system and how it was primed in childhood; on your location, your income and luck. I had long-lived grandparents on both sides; had measles, rubella, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough and scarlet fever before five; and in spite of semi-permanent tonsillitis was 20 before any antibiotic entered my body. I spent the years until 16 on the north-east coast of Yorkshire, through bitter snowbound winters, my lungs loaded with fresh sea air. Attitude and expectations are important too. In the north Cotswolds, where I spent 25 years, local men and women had been farmers and vegetable pickers for generations, working in all weathers, bent double, earning pitiful wages. Fresh air doesn’t compensate for prematurely worn-out bodies, where 40 is the new 60, not the other way about.