AGE sneaks up on us all. Particularly when it comes to cutting your toenails.

Even at the peak of what passed for my physical fitness in my youth, I couldn’t cross my legs. Not properly.

Young ladies of my acquaintance could twine their legs as if plaiting rope.

All I could manage was resting one ankle on top of the other knee. And that hurt after 10 seconds. It’s one of the drawbacks of having short legs.

Add that to advancing years – I mean, let’s face it, I won’t see 50 again – and it has become increasingly difficult to attend to such personal hygiene issues as cutting my toenails because this involves contortions for which my body was never designed.

At my time of life, my body is designed for sitting at a desk and typing, leaning at a bar and sprawling on a sofa watching sport on TV. I’m lethal in a prone position.

But bending over wielding nail clippers?

A further complication is that the nails of my little toes tend to grow quicker than any others and have an aptitude for mischief: they dig into the toes next door.

They had to be trimmed and I sat struggling on the bed when my wife Maria came into the room to investigate the strange sounds of exertion.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to cut my nails.”

“Give it here,” she said, taking the clippers.

“It’s only the nails on the little toes,” I said.

She turned her back, grabbed a foot and tucked it under her arm and I suddenly had visions of Sir Laurence Olivier undertaking unlicensed dental work on Dustin Hoffman in The Marathon Man.

Imagine the pain you could inflict with a pair of clippers for any manner of imagined slights of which I was unaware. I am, after all, a bloke, and unaware most of the time.

But she snipped the two offending nails without drawing blood and left me to recover from the ordeal with a nap and reflect on the intimacy of handling someone else’s feet.

Chiropody was never a profession I could have pursued.

Or any occupation that involved hands-on with members of the public.

I am, of course far more suited to sitting at a desk and typing. But I shall attempt to be far more pleasant to my wife in the future. Just in case.