So this is 60 ...

When my grandad was in his seventies, he told me that he had never felt any older than 16.

He never really acted it, either.

He didn’t like to be called “grandpa”. He wanted me to use his name, “Jimmy”, so we’d be more like mates.

He liked to sit with me in the pub at lunchtime: I drank beer while he poured whisky from his hip flask into a glass hidden under the table.

Since Jimmy and I were similar people, I had assumed I would remain a teenager for the rest of my life too.

But when I had my first child, I grew from 16 years old to 40 overnight – which was just as well, since I was 41 at the time.

Now, like all parents, I never cease to wonder What is it that childless people actually do?

How do they fill their endless leisure time?

Why haven’t they all painted the Mona Lisa or carved the Statue of Liberty, or at least broken the world record for balancing spoons on their nose?

I guess I’ll find out when my kids leave home – in the year 2050, or thereabouts, when they finally pay off their HECs debts.

While my kids’ social lives have blossomed, mine has wilted. I find it harder to be bothered to leave the house after dark. What’s the point? You only have to find your way back again.

But I used to go out every night when I was younger. By the time I became a father, I was probably ready to quieten down.

Most days, I don’t mind growing older.

After all, there are some annoying things I don’t have to do anymore: like comb my hair, for instance, since most of it has fallen out.

And people seem to find me more approachable. Three times in the last few months, strangers of a similar age have come up to me in restaurants to ask if the food was any good.

I presume they think that because we are of the same vintage, we must have the same taste. Like great wines. Or rotten eggs.

Among the five senses with which I was born, taste seems to be the one that has changed the least: I still like everything hot, spicy or pickled, and preferably all three.

I never had much of a sense of smell, but now I can barely detect any odour – including, worryingly, gas. I’ve lost more than half my hearing (and gained tinnitus in return) and my eyesight has faded like my memories of evenings on the town.

I was lucky not have to wear glasses until my mid-50s, when I noticed that type had suddenly become smaller and somehow more mobile. Initially I tried to adapt to this curious change by using a toy magnifying glass, but eventually it became clear (or blurry, really) that I needed spectacles.

I still don’t think of myself as somebody who wears glasses – and that’s kind of true, as I can never find them.

The eminent author Rob Drewe advised me to buy several cheap pairs from the chemist and leave one in each room in the house. However, he also warned me that all my spectacles would soon gather in the same room and in the one spot – and there would be nothing whatever that I could do to stop this.

About this, as in so much else, Rob was correct.

On the plus side, age has given me the mornings.

When I was younger, I knew that early mornings existed, but I had never actually experienced one.

In recent years, however, I have found myself waking up first at 7am, then 6am and now 5am.  

Just like my grandad used to do.

Eventually, I can see myself getting out of bed at the time I used to go to sleep. Lunchtime will become my evening, just as it was for the retired drinkers of my grandad’s generation, and the circle will be complete.

So I wake up with the birdsong (which is lovely and feels somehow… natural) and I’m usually on my way to the gym by about dawn.

I have come to know everyone else who is out and about at 6am and, gloriously, they are all my age and older. We all smile and wave to each other, and we’re all on our way to the weights room or yoga or pilates or a coffee, or a “fasting” appointment at the pathologist.

Ageing has brought few surprises, but some things that I imagined might happen have not: I haven’t gone off modern music, and I still like listening to young bands, for example (although most indie rock sounds like stuff that was around when I was a kid anyway).

But I would never have guessed that there would come a time when I had no opinion on most of the apparently important political issues of the day, and I couldn’t work out quite why young people felt so angry (except that they don’t run the world – yet).

I’m fortunate in that I’ve fulfilled my childhood ambitions. I’ve been a journalist, an historian and a novelist, I’ve written for TV and radio (although, obviously, I prefer to think of it as the wireless). I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll (probably) never be a teen idol or a state boxing champion, an expert linguist or the world record-holder for balancing spoons on my nose (I blame the kids for that last one).

I think maybe the greatest gift of ageing is perspective. I know it sounds trite, but I’ve come to realise how lucky I am. I’ve grown up in a generation that hasn’t had to suffer a great depression or a world war or anything much worse than the rise of reality TV.

Other people have fought for everything that I take for granted – people from my parents’ generation but, more than that, my grandparents’ generation.  

So I owe you, grandad. I mean, Jimmy.

You were entitled to never grow up.