When did I start feeling old? Perhaps it was when a twelve-year-old boy who had a crush on me gave me two Enid Blyton books for my eleventh birthday. But that was a smug ‘Enid-Blyton-at-eleven-duh-what-do-you-take-me-for’ sort of feeling. I bristled, but thanked him politely, looked down my nose at him, and it was over between us. For ever.

[More:]

And I didn’t feel particularly young at a well-developed bra-wearing thirteen, when a very wimpy smooth-chinned little boy two inches shorter and two months younger than me came knocking at the door asking to take me out. My teasing older siblings did not help.

But no, it started long before that, in October 1961, when I was seven and three-quarters. I had just arrived at boarding school, in the middle of the last term of the year, because my well-meaning mother thought it would be a good idea for me to ‘settle in’ before a new year started. She had done a great job home schooling me, and I was way ahead in my ‘Old Lob’ reading and my sums. But in the swimming pool I felt hopeless and ancient. My breast-stroke was fine, thanks to my brother’s tuition (his method consisted of progressively letting the air out of my inflatable ball as we swam amongst the water snakes back home on Lake Tanganyika, till I was desperately clutching a heavy, soggy piece of deflated plastic), but I hadn’t mastered the crawl. At my first swimming lesson, in that freezing pool (Nairobi is 5,000 feet above sea level and COLD at eight-twenty in the morning), I bluffed the overarm, but my legs could do nothing more than a joint amphibious backward thrust. I was soon nicknamed ‘froggy legs’. Imagine the humiliation: an almost eight-year-old Convent girl who couldn’t swim the crawl. Simply shameful.

Feeling old accompanied me through my eleven years at boarding school. This was because I was always the eldest in my class: my birthday is on January 4, and January 1 was the cut-off date.

When I was fifteen, Alitalia refused to give me special treatment as an unaccompanied minor. BOAC, the airline I usually took, offered the service to all minors, but for Alitalia, you had to be under twelve. They looked at me strangely when I asked - a ‘big girl like you?’ look, a ‘shall we get you a colouring set?’ look. I was humiliated. After all, I’d only wanted to be pampered and served first and escorted off the plane before everyone else. I’d wanted the V.I.P. treatment. Of COURSE I, a seasoned traveler, could look after myself on a flight from Nairobi to Rome.

Maybe a real ageing – or aged – turning point came when I arrived at Edinburgh University. Once again it was October. It was 1973 and I was almost twenty, and everyone else – or everyone I came in contact with – seemed to be seventeen going on eighteen. The gap was due to my ill-fated January birth, to the Kenyan education system where years ended in November (making me miss one), and the Scottish education system which had everyone finishing school practically in their mid-teens.

And then, just a few months after my arrival, I fell in love. I was twenty, and he was still eighteen. We were both shocked to discover each other’s ages. I mean, boys were meant to be older than their girlfriends! My Dad was five years my mum’s senior, and my sister was five years younger than her husband. That was how these things worked. (Thirty-five years later that fifteen-month gap doesn’t seem to matter much).

We soon got used to it, and a long stretch of feeling comforrtable with my age followed. I was married at twenty four, and had children at twenty-six, twenty-eight and thirty-one (this last baby came a bit past my prime according to my mum, but I didn’t let it bother me). I felt like a young wife and a young mum.

Then suddenly, the G.P. said ‘You have to stop taking the Pill.’

‘Why? It suits me. I feel great.’

‘There’s a risk. You’re thirty-five.’

I pleaded: ‘But I don’t smoke. And I’m not overweight.’ I got two years’ grace, but this was the first age-related health alarm. I took it on board, and went back to feeling young for ten more years.

We won’t go into too much detail, but that was when the dreaded M hit, five years earlier than expected (well, than I expected, anyway). I felt dreadful: hot, cold, weepy, moody, irritable. I refused to take anything chemical to help. ‘This is NATURAL!’ I screamed. I shall deal with it NATURALLY. So I took up all sorts of things that weren’t at all in my nature, like reiki and acupressure and kinesiology and yoga and soya milk. It all helped.

That same year I was iagnosed with blood pressure.

‘You’ll have to take medication.’

‘NO! I’m healthy! I’m a doctor’s daughter!’ I screamed. But I had to give in. Then tinnitus struck. A humming, quite loud, in both ears. I was living in Tanzania, where the warm ylang-ylang-scented evening air was buzzed with tree frogs and crickets, so I just pretended they carried on their monotonous chant all day, and forgot about it.

Till my birthday. This year. This month. The facts had to be faced. With more than one person talking in the room, I couldn’t hear properly, and ended up switching off.

‘Sixty per cent hearing loss on the high notes,’ the ENT specialist said. Thank goodness my husband has a deep base voice, I thought. ‘It doesn’t usually happen at your age…’ Was that meant to make me feel young? ‘Try Gingko,’ he said. I am.

And a week later, today, a routine blood test came out with rocket high levels of the bad sort of cholesterol. Me? Cholesterol? Come on! I’m a pescatarian! Well, actually, I have to confess that since we arrived in Belgium a few months ago, I have been tempted by the cheese … and the chocolates .

‘Medication,’ the heart doc said. ‘No way!’ I replied. Result? I’m on a strict diet. No cheese, no chocolates, no yoghourt, no treats…for a month. It’s a test. To see if the levels come down. I am determined, because if not, I become a pill-popping junkie.

Today, two and a half weeks after my fifty-fifth birthday, and thirty-five years and one day after I met my husband on a rainy night in Edinburgh, is the day that I officially started feeling old.

But it’s not all gloom and doom: I have my new bike, Willabelle, in my cellar, and she and I are planning to have lots of fun together! Watch this space!

P.S. for Helen: Genevieve is indeed a magnificent name, but it translates as ‘Genoveffa’ in Italian. Genoveffa la Racchia was an extremely ugly cartoon character in the Fifties, after which the name’s popularity plummeted…so Willabelle it is.