Long life | 20 October 2016

‘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. My pen was poised at that moment to fill in a box marked ‘Colour of hair’, and I asked Matthew what I should put. ‘Don’t fool yourself,’ he said. ‘Grey.’ Now it’s white.

Thereafter the common symptoms of ageing accumulated. There were the usual dental problems — crowns, bridges, tooth implants — and the diseases given you in punishment for bad habits like smoking or drinking — chronic bronchitis, diabetes, and so on. And then comes loss of hearing, which is one of the most annoying afflictions of the old. By the time I had reached my sixties, this had become a problem for me as well; but luckily people now make very efficient hearing aids, which are also so small that they are almost unnoticeable.