Fordyce Maxwell: 'The crunching sound now on jumping from a worktop is cartilage not floorboard'

IT BEGAN jocularly, as things do when several people of a certain age are gathered together, as we gradually noticed that we all groaned. Not in pain, mercifully, and probably more of a grunt, but we all did it when we stood up or, worse, when we sat down. Not loudly, but audibly.

After about an hour of sound-effects, redoubled at one point when someone dropped a pen and bent to pick it up, tying a shoelace while down there, someone else said: "Remember swear boxes, when there was less swearing in a Saturday night pub than there is now on television, or even Radio 3, any night of the week?"

We remembered. "Well," she went on, "why not have a groan box? At 5p a groan we'd have collected a couple of quid this afternoon."

Strange but true, groaning and stifled grunting fizzled out as conversation turned to when grunting was permissible, when we'd grunted or groaned when young – no, it wasn't that sort of company – and when it might be permissible now.

Sport of any kind and gym work were the popular choices. I agreed. Coming from rude peasant stock is fine for manual labour, but not for a physique designed for nifty work on parallel bars, cross-beams, ropes and vaulting horses. I grunted a lot and have never been tempted to try anything in that line since. I discount a teenage attempt to impress a group of girls at Prior Park swings by hanging upside down from the cross bar by my knees; the shoulder I landed on still pains me occasionally in damp weather.

So nothing acrobatic in my background, I thought, until we began to compare present experiences of groaning aloud for a reason, not the habit we had all apparently got into of accompanying the slightest effort with a half-groan as if we were middle-aged.

That was because as we talked we realised we had all taken our life in our hands, more often feet, by clambering on anything handy to carry out household, work or garden chores in a hurry.

At one time, with youth and flexibility on our side, we could get away with it. Now a wobble on a windowsill or chair can't be resolved by the good old boys' comic solution of "With one bound, Jack was free."

Now Jack is more likely to realise that the crunching sound after jumping from a worktop is cartilage rather than floorboard and that trying to balance between a suspension chair on casters and a filing cabinet to reach a shelf an inch beyond fingertips is not a good idea

When Jack – that's right, I – found myself in that position as the chair started to move the group consensus was that I was entitled to groan. Also that a brain transplant should be considered. But by then we had also established that each one of us had narrowly avoided adding to the national household accidents toll in the past 12 months and that, groan or no groan, it was time we all grew up.