Ian McMillan: It's never too late to keep going up in the world

The next time I move it'll be to a bungalow, which will mean that it'll be at a time when I can't do stairs anymore, and I won't want a stairlift because I'm useless with machines.

At the moment, I use the stairs as part of my middle-aged bloke's exercise routine, but only when I'm alone in the house, because to be frank you feel daft walking briskly up and down stairs as many times as you can manage to no particular purpose.

It makes me gasp like a pair of church organ bellows and it makes me feel as though my thighs have been rubbed with chilli powder, which means it's doing me good. At least that's what I tell myself.

The bungalow in the future, though, will be the last stop before the terminus, if you get my drift. The last port of call before the final berth. The last chip in the chip shop.

The other day I was walking downstairs (not as part of my routine: it was a return trip from brushing my teeth) when one of my slippers fell off and tumbled downwards in what I can only describe as a comedy manner.

It was as though it was a children's character called Sammy The Silly Slipper. It went down two stairs quickly; it almost stopped then it twisted and turned and fell down some more. It was as though it was doing a ridiculous dance.

I almost wrote the book as I watched that footwear tumble: See Silly Sammy Slip. Sammy is a silly slipping slipper. Sammy is a flipping silly slipper slipping and flipping down the flipping slippy stairs. Oh how I laughed, my chortles so strong they nearly sent me tumbling down the stairs after Silly Sammy.

Then something struck me: stairs are for much more than climbing up and down. They're almost sacred sites. They're venues for stories, for comedy, for tragedy, for moments of high drama and instants of low farce, and perhaps in a bungalow I'd miss them more than I can say.

When you're a child, the stairs are dark and mysterious; in the sepia days before everybody had central heating the stairs were cold and you could feel the Arctic air rushing down from the bathroom.

As a lad I was a bit nervous of going up the stairs. I wasn't scared of anything specific, but it was just that the soft noise of my feet making their way from step to step used to make me a bit jittery.

In all the horror stories I read and in all the scary films I half-watched before terror forced me behind the settee with a copy of the Radio Times over my face, the monster was always upstairs, lurking on the landing or hiding in a wardrobe with a turnip-lantern grin that momentarily distracted you from his claws.

As you get older, the stairs are either something you get sent up or something you flounce up. Parents, the end of their tether long since reached, say 'Get up them stairs now!' to their recalcitrant offspring.

Teenagers, denied the opportunity to go to the pub with their mates and watch punk band The Dishevelled because they're grounded, run up the stairs in floods of tears, pulling off their distressed faux-PVC boots as they go, which almost causes them to trip up and fall downstairs like a stunt man in a cheap film. Noisily, in other words. And slowly. And with lots of sounds like "Unff" and "Gnrrr".

And I know that falling down the stairs is never, ever funny. Never, ever. Except sometimes. Like when my lad Andrew, as a young child, fell spectacularly from the top to the bottom, winded himself and shouted in a croaky voice "I've broken my voicebox!"

Or when I, as an even younger child, tried to fly by launching myself from the top of the stairs sporting a pair of wings made from some torn up Oxydol packets and bounced down every step like a cartoon character. Maybe I should have used Omo.

There's something comforting, too, about going up the stairs to bed. It's an everyday rite of passage, a gentle closing-down of the boilers, a preparation for rest.

It's a change of scene that's part of a comforting ascending routine. "I'm going up," as we say round here. And what would you do in a bungalow? What would you say? "I'm going across"? "I'm going over"? No, going up is the best.

I guess, when I move into my bungalow, I'll have to buy a set of false steps...