How old is ‘too old’?

Kazuo Ishiguro thinks writers are over the hill after their thirties. Elen Rives, Frank Lampard's estranged girlfriend, despairs that at 34 she's old".

Geena Davis complains she can't get a decent role because of her decreptitude (she's 52). I can only say that Harriet Harman's blast against ageism — enshrined in the new Equalities Bill — comes not a moment too soon.

At 52, I am ancient by the Rives/Ishiguro standard — but personally I find the idea that the best is behind me incomprehensible. I didn't have my first book published until I was 40, and my first novel, which won the Whitbread First Novel award, came out when I was 43. I was married (for the second time admittedly) when I was 50, and only a few years ago I enjoyed the arrival of my fourth daughter.

From what I remember of being 30, most of these achievements would have been unthinkable. Like Martin Amis, who Ishiguro says is obsessed by age, I was then haunted by the idea that things were slipping away from me.

At the same time, oddly enough, I was aware that I had very little idea of myself, possessed virtually nothing that would amount to "wisdom" and thought the endless self-demanded duty to be present at the mythical party to which I was never invited was tiresome and stressful.
Now that I am "old" I know the present is more fulfilling than the past.

Certainly it's an improvement mentally. One can easily roll out a list of literary geniuses who continued to flower late in life — Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Jean Rhys and many more. But even for anyone less talented, life is more palatable because it makes more sense — that is, you understand it contains little sense in the first place.

There are disadvantages to growing older — you smell, your teeth crumble and the bad habits you once thought you could get rid of by force of sheer of willpower you now realise are as inescapable as your rumpled skin.

But the great consolation is that all your contemporaries are crumbling in much the same way. Even people who were once rock stars I can now joyfully observe on TV resembling balding retired pork-pie tasters.

Thanks to the great advantages of male vanity, peer comparison and self-delusion, when you look in the mirror you look the same as you ever did.

And if you're a woman, need I do more than conjoin "Helen", "Mirren" and "bikini"? Or, for that matter, "Geena" and "Davis".

As for decaying mentally, hey, forget about it.

Because being brilliant at forgetting things is just one of many new pleasures that lie in store for everyone as time rolls implacably on.