The best things about ageing, from freedom to knowing exactly what you like

It started with a tweet. I wondered why people like the Edinburgh fringe arts festival so much, when it sounds like my idea of hell: loads of “theatre”, audience interaction, comedians and circus-type things.

Edinburgh itself is gorgeous, so am I just a misery guts? That is a rhetorical question, obviously. The answers came thick and fast. I would love the fringe, apparently, if only I got taken to the right shows. Then I could go to 10 in one day! But I know myself. One artwork a day is quite enough, ta.

Then, of course, came the inevitable low blow.

I was told my attitude is a sign of ageing, because I don’t want to trek up to Scotland, where the best joke this year, apparently, is a zinger about cauliflower florets. Jesus. I want my money back and I didn’t even go.

Three blogs celebrating fashionable seniors

Fittingly, a new report, Ageist Britain, tells us the bleedin’ obvious: that society is ageist and life after 50 is assumed to be awful, as we are all bitter hags or old farts. Or, in my case, both.

A lot of rubbish is talked about getting older. Nora Ephron is the go-to person for women with crepey necks. Me? I prefer Ursula K. Le Guin: “I am not ‘in’ this body. I am this body. Waist or no waist.” That is a life lesson I would like every girl to learn. Le Guin also said: “Erase my age, you erase my life – me.”

But Google the signs of ageing and the results will be about skincare, diet and exercise. Fundamentally and depressingly, not the actual point.

Some of us will die of diseases that are genetic. Some will look better than we did when we were young. Most of us do just fine. Wear a bikini. Don’t wear a bikini. Really, I do think there are bigger things to think about (and I don’t mean a forgiving one-piece).

If you want Carol Vorderman’s bum and Lana Del Rey’s lips and Kim Kardashian’s waist, I can’t help you. If you think a knee lift will change your life, well, good luck. If you think you can stay forever young, I have some breaking news.

But no one talks about the good bits of ageing, so I will. The menopause. A time of anxiety and then freedom, when women move from being someone who can reproduce to someone who can’t.

Everything changes physically and mentally. It is a premonition of death and one becomes a different kind of being altogether: a creature who can only reproduce itself.

Ageing is also a process of editing. You know those people you didn’t like much? Well, don’t bother with them. If someone has said “we must do lunch” for 20 years and you haven’t, you are not going to now, just as you are not going to wear that little black dress you were wearing when you were 20.

There is no need to go the full Marie Kondo, but you are old enough to know what does not spark joy. Do you want to go to a restaurant where every ingredient has been cooked five clever ways? No. Do you want to sit in bars where the music is so loud that everyone is shouting? No again. Do you still want to go and see loud music? For sure. My God, The Necks was the most fabulous gig I have been to this year.

As for parties, well, as Iman said wisely when David Bowie was wooing her: “He has been to all the parties there are.” Nothing makes you feel older than drinking cheap white wine and making small talk with people who ask you about schools and property. Trust me.

Getting old means relief at being cancelled – not in the social media sense, but in the “let’s not bother meeting for lunch” sense. It means loving new things and discarding old things. It means living as you want to live, not as you should.

Apart from chronic disease, of course, the worst thing about ageing is having to wear stupid glasses. But there is the wonder, too, as that Blur song says, of the way the days “seem to fall through you / Well, just let them go.”

Time is for wasting. Time is what you make of it. You choose.

The best sign of ageing, though, is that you are still you – only more so.

The Guardian

Look out for more stories from the Post about ageing this week. Follow along at Ageing Society.