Mark Woods: A golden time to be a golden oldie

This wasn’t a 21st though, or even a bunch of newly 40-year-olds getting together in an atempt to turn back the years – this was to mark someone turning 70-years-old. It wasn’t that long ago that a septuagenarian birthday bash would have consisted of an eccles cake and a cup of tea in the special china rather than a mug.

As for any music involved, rather than the jukebox journey from Sinatra to the Beatles and on to Abba which this crowd of 1960s children got down to, turning the same age little more than a decade ago would have been accompanied by a 33 from Paul Robeson – not without its merits, but a very different feel, you have to admit. It’s not only the soundtrack that is changing things though, the sensibilities of what are still fustily referred to officially as “old age pensioners”, are far removed from the generation that proceeded them. Despite austerity, despite the cold winters of recent years and despite it apparently being increasingly difficult to find anything good on the telly, it feels from the outside like it’s a pretty good time to be in your dotage.

Given statistics bandied about which suggest one in four babies born today in the UK will reach their hundredth year, its debatable in the extreme if this perceived golden oldie golden age will be around for the next generation. The way things are going, we will all need to live longer to be able to get our carriage clock on retirement at 90. And yet as I myself reach 40, this notion of a seemingly never-ending parade of birthdays seems a long, long way away as the spectre of cancer begins to rear its head in my circle of friends and family for the first time.

Despite all the medical advances made in recent years this dreaded disease has in the very recent past already taken a school friend and struck the wife of another. It’s a dark reminder that despite what the stats might say, life is still the most fragile of things – and if we do manage to reach a ripe old age, a celebration is most certainly called for.

Twitter @mark_r_woods