I’m nearly 60. I’m still interested in sex. Is that a problem?

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The other day I casually remarked to my ex-wife that our son’s new teacher is ‘really hot’. She gave me a look of disgust, shook her head and said, ‘You dirty old man!’

It’s not the first time I’ve been called that, and usually I just keep smiling and stay silent. But this time I bridled. Recently, in two separate courtrooms, both Dave Lee Travis and Bill Roache had been denounced as ’dirty old men’. OK, I confess: maybe I did emit a ‘phwhoar!’ or two too many for my ex’s taste — but did I deserve to be branded a dirty old man?

I hope not. When I was a teenager I always swore that I would never grow up to be a dirty old man — like my dad. Whenever I found him with his arm around some woman I used to say to him, mimicking the voice of Harold Steptoe, ‘You dirty old man!’

My dad was still at it in his seventies. I remember the horror of seeing him on the floor of the Groucho Club after he made a puckered-lipped lunge at a woman — and missed and fell off his bar stool. At 80 he would wobble along on his walking frame and go up to women at bus stops and say: ‘Hello beautiful, want to have lunch with me?’ No, I would never be like that!

And yet here I am, nearly 60 and still on the pull. It’s a feeling that a growing number of men will experience, too. Demographically we are becoming an older society, and baby-boomer men like me have rejected the traditional idea that growing older means giving up certain passions and pleasures of one’s youth.