WHEN you shake your head from side to side does it sound like the back of your neck is full of ball-bearings?

Have your arms gradually shrunk so that they are now too short –even when fully extended – to hold books and newspapers in focus?

Do you instinctively suck your tummy in every time you pass a mirror?

Or when you kneel down, do your knees make a sound like an ancient wooden door slowly opening in the dead of night in a Hitchcock film?

Mine do, but they never used to.

I have therefore come to the not-too-surprising conclusion that these are all signs of ageing.

People divide into two camps at this point: those who accept this natural process gracefully and those who fight it tooth and nail. I belong to the latter group.

The problem is that Nature designed Man – and Woman – so that they had to tirelessly hunt and forage to survive, wearing themselves out in the process and shuffling off this mortal coil after a measly three or four decades.

She did not, indeed could not, foresee the advent of leisure time, Saga holidays or reduced gym membership fees for the over 55s.

Had she done so, today we might actually possess bodies that would remain in good fettle for a typical lifespan in the 21st century.

Three score years and ten in Jesus’ day – a mere nanosecond ago in evolutionary terms – is now over four score years.

Many of us can expect to live to 90 and some of you reading this will hit a century and get a telegram from the Queen, King Charles or even King William.

As it is, our minds are out of step with their corporal casings. My own active 20-odd-year-old brain (or so it seems to me) is trapped inside an increasingly wrinkly and creaky half-century-old body.