Fordyce Maxwell: 'I'm glad to be here. At my age, I'm glad to be anywhere'

I HAD what some think of as a significant birthday this week. Yesterday, since you ask, and it's never too late for cards and enclosures. Cash, cheque or book voucher, I don't mind.

Yes, only joking. We don't make a big deal of birthdays in our family. They're all equally significant, or insignificant, depending on your view of life and all that this particular one means is that from now on I can enter the Field of Dreams – aka Shielfield, home of Berwick Rangers – more cheaply. Hurray.

All I hope is that there are no rude comments when I do. A schoolmate still bears the scars of when she and a friend were trying to get on a bus from Kelso to their Borders village along with a tide of youngsters coming out of school.

The tide parted to let them through when the bus driver shouted: "I've telt ye afore – let these auld buggers on first."

No doubt this birthday will mean other opportunities apart from football grounds to do the same for less. Not forgetting starting to get something back from the state for all the years I've paid in to it.

Not that I'm complaining about that either because I've been lucky and how lucky didn't dawn until I tried to start the pension-claiming process on-line. Three times I tried, three times a different friendly and helpful member of staff at the pensions office had to give up because their computer refused to deal with me.

Apparently, the third one finally concluded, it was because they had too few recorded details to satisfy online identification – never out of work, never ill, never claimed benefits of any kind, since I left school. Now after completing a written form, and with actuarial estimates complete, payments begin next week.

The key, of course, is not to feel older year by year no matter what the calendar might indicate, no matter how tempting it is to think that John Cleese's suggested epitaph for himself "Was that it?" would cover the case to date, or that some things we know we've done, or even achieved, seem so detached as to have happened to some one else with so much still to do. On down days there can be a temptation to brood. To think of other birthdays, of those who died too soon, to think about what might have been rather than what was or is. But that can happen at any stage. I recall thinking for a time in the difficult mid-twenties that that was it, plant me now. Thirty, too, seemed a milestone too far when it was actually a new beginning. And for some reason – apart from, looking at photographs, it was a time when I seemed to have set a target weight of 20 stones – 50 was a troubling birthday.

Now I take them cheerfully as they come. As George Burns doing cabaret in his 100th year used to say: "I'm glad to be here. At my age, I'm glad to be anywhere."

An admirable sentiment I plan to echo for years.