We can’t stop the ageing process – well I suppose we can if we die, but for me there’s not an easy route back from that. This ageing process means that there will always be someone younger than us, always someone who to us seems really young, always someone to whom we must seem really old. Fact.

I was reminded of this ineluctable fact by a friend of mine, Mr Seamus O’Riordan, whom I caught up with on the phone recently. He was getting his eyes tested not so long ago and bemoaning the fact that it was time to embrace the world of reading glasses, the consequences of which were that people might get a reminder of his reaching a ‘certain age’, to adapt from the gloriously euphemistic French phrase.

‘Well,’ his optician rejoined, ‘I’m 65. You seem really young to me.’ A rather sobering postscript to this is that the older gentleman died a few months later.

It’s all relative. It all depends on your perspective.

So what do we do about it? Two things:

  1. Live for the moment, and
  2. Look after ourselves, so we remain young in body, young in mind, young at heart