The four letter word which is the key to growing old successfully - Susan Dalgety

In Prime Ministerial terms, Keir Starmer, 61, is practically geriatric. If he gets the keys to Number 10 on 4 July, he will be the oldest person to take up the top job since Labour’s Jim Callaghan. The avuncular Callaghan, who presided over the Winter of Discontent, was 64 years old when he took office in 1976. Margaret Thatcher, who had the mien of a well-preserved lady in her late 60s from about the age of forty, was only 53 when her reign began in 1979. Tony Blair, the last Labour leader to win a landslide, celebrated his 44th birthday a week after he won a stonking majority. And at 42, Rishi Sunak was the UK’s youngest Prime Minister since Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool in 1812.

Starmer may be a youngster compared to President Joe Biden, now 81, and his challenger Donald Trump, who turned 78 yesterday, but he is still eligible for his pensioner’s bus pass. But perhaps what we need as a country just now is a grumpy old man in charge. Even one who still manages to play football every weekend and uses more hair product than the average teenage boy.

A few days ago, I was reflecting on Starmer’s age, as you do, when I got a call to tell me the book I have co-edited with Lucy Hunter Blackburn was an instant Sunday Times bestseller. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht is a collection of essays by women, chronicling the five-year campaign from 2018 to stop the Scottish Government introducing self-identification of sex and so reducing women to a mere ‘identity’, a feeling in the head of men who, for whatever reason, wanted to be recognised as legally female. Most of the women are ‘golden girls’, in other words, over 50. Some like me are nearly 70, a few are in their eighth decade. Yet here we are with a bestseller to our name, described by one seasoned commentator as “probably the most important political work to come out of Scotland this century.”

As a reserved, bookish child, growing up in a remote corner of rural Scotland, I used to dream of being a writer. I treasured the small red Silvine notebooks where I scribbled stories, and was the only teenager in my Higher English class who relished writing essays. But life got in the way of my childhood ambitions, and it wasn’t until I was approaching my 65th birthday that I published my first book. The Spirit of Malawi, a study of one of the world’s poorest countries and its people, was most definitely not a best seller, but when it arrived fresh from the publisher, with my name on the front cover, I wept. Tears of joy, but also relief that I had finally achieved what I had set out to do nearly sixty years previously. To now see my name alongside Lucy’s in a list that contains Jonathan Dimbleby and Max Hastings is a strange, almost surreal, experience. Surely in my late sixties I should be slowing down, spending my time on needlework and Suduko, not planning my third book?

Perhaps. But in the back of my head, there is a small voice that tells me if I slow down I will die. If I stop to smell the two rose bushes my husband has carefully cultivated in our back green, I will have given in to the inevitable process of ageing. If I am not planning my next trip, a weekend in France to see a dear friend, which just happens to coincide with Macron’s snap election (he was 39 when he became President), my mind will atrophy and my body shrivel. If I am not scrolling through social media while listening to the latest lads podcast, I will become irrelevant. My joints ache. I am increasingly hard of hearing. My blood pressure unstable. But I cannot sit still. My mind does not rest. I need to keep moving forwards.

One of my heroes is Muiccia Prada, the 74-year-old boss of the eponymous fashion empire. A former political scientist, she is a cultural icon. In a recent front cover for American Vogue, she looks every inch her age. She eschews botox and fillers, wears little, if no, make-up and cuts her own shoulder-length fine hair. She looks 74 and absolutely fabulous. Inside, she shares her thoughts on growing old. “It’s strange,” she says, “because every single morning I have to decide if I am a 15 year-old girl or an old lady near to death.”

There are many mornings – or more likely, hours in the middle of the deep, dark night – when I feel like an old lady near to death. When my ageing bladder wakes me for the second time since 10pm, and I stagger to the bathroom, grateful that I am still alive, but terrified that my numb arm is the sign of a stroke, not just an awkward sleeping position.

But there are just as many moments during the day when I am certain I am still 15, when the first few bars of pop song – whether Bowie or Raye – make my heart soar and my (swollen) feet dance. I scour the internet to check my trainers are still cool-ish and laugh in the face of my overdraft (40 years and counting).

Prada said in the same interview that risk is something she likes. And perhaps that is the key to growing old successfully. Just as the country is probably going to take a risk on a grumpy old man to clean up the mess left behind by a forty-something geek, then as we age, we need to take more risks, not fewer. After all, what have we got to lose?