‘Welcome, Mr Chancellor, to the Age UK community,’ said the voice. It was a warm, friendly woman’s voice, but bearing a chilling message. At 76, I willingly accept that I am no longer young, but I don’t want to belong to a club for which old age is the only membership qualification. I don’t want to cross the Rubicon into an alien, exclusive territory.
Ageing doesn’t strike suddenly. It is a gradual process that starts very young. I remember, when I hit 30, how keenly I felt the loss of my youth, and it really did mark the beginning of decline. By the time I reached 40, I couldn’t read a London street map at night without getting out of the car and standing under a street lamp. So I got reading glasses, which were replaced within a few years by bifocals after television images also became blurred.
I was 47 when the Independent newspaper made me its first Washington correspondent; and I was filling in an American visa form in a London restaurant when Matthew Symonds, one of its founders, joined me for lunch.
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