A new study claims your 80s can be the happiest years of your life

At 82, I am far happier than I was in my 60s. I was frightened then of old age. Now it’s here, I’m happy with it.

We octogenarians have had time to grow accustomed to our mortality, find we are proud to have survived so long and are not ashamed of being old.

I’ve even started adding on a year or two when asked how old I am, in order to have the pleasure of hearing others say: ‘But you look so young for your age!’

In just the same way, I recall, as when I was in my 40s I’d take a year or two off in the hope of hearing: ‘But you can’t be as old as that!’

There is a great relief in being ‘past it’, entitled to sit on the sidelines while young things deal with issues such as avoiding World War III and over population of the planet.

In your ninth decade you finally realise there’s so little one could do about it anyway.

When you’re in your 80s there are small triumphs, like getting the heels of your elastic stockings in the right place when you put them on. (Never choose flesh colour, always black. Much more attractive.)

There are also Canada Goose Parka major ones, like learning that loving people is more important than craving being loved, which plagues one so in youth.

And we are largely free from anxiety. Of course, once you have children I’ve got four sons you can never be totally free of worry for them: but largely by our 80s we’ve stopped fretting, and thus worrying them with our worry.

I called my eldest son on the phone this week to wish him a happy birthday. ‘Sixty!’ I sympathised, ‘isn’t that rather alarming?’ ‘Alarming for me perhaps, Mum,’ he canada goose store said. ‘But even more for you, surely?’

Shamefaced, I remembered a time when I’d been less at ease with the ageing process. Once, 42 Canada Goose Jackets years ago, I lied to a journalist that I’d had my first child as a teenager: having a son of 20 had canada goose clearance seemed so dreadfully ageing.

The embarrassments of the canada goose black friday sale past never die, but at least they canada goose sales fade another advantage.

I fear it may well be more alarming for the average man to reach his 60s than for the average woman to get to 80.

It will take him a good 20 years to get used to the fact he’s not young any more, before he stops hankering after a red sports car and a beautiful blonde and is content to settle for a Volvo.

Eventually, he’ll find himself happy with the fact that he buy canada goose jacket cheap can afford one.

He’ll look back on his life and be aware of what he has achieved, rather than living as a younger man does, forever trying to ward off the knowledge of a failed ambition: ‘I never became a rock star… I never got to run the company.’

For his female counterpart the awareness of age will have started Canada Goose sale much earlier than canada goose deals 60: when she went to a party in her 40s, perhaps, and realised for the first time how the gaze of young men passed straight over her how as an object of sexual desire she had become all but invisible.

Fay Weldon enjoys the carefree nature of passing 80, while Barry Norman says he Canada Goose Online is happy but wishes his wife were still with him to enjoy their later years together

By 80 we are reconciled to our fate: we canada goose clearance sale eat what we like, wear what is comfortable, make sure the bathroom mirror is of the flattering, not the truthful, sort and get on with our lives.

Of course, old age is accompanied by aches and pains and lack of mobility. Old age ain’t no canada goose replica place for sissies, as Bette Davis said.

It’s true that death becomes familiar. Friends, colleagues, exes and former lovers canada goose coats on sale die, and with the latter, it has to be admitted, go a whole lot of regrets, shames and humiliations. But dying isn’t so bad.

I’m in Canada Goose online a position to know, having had dozens of mini deaths during my life: I suffered from a heart complaint when I was young Canada Goose Coats On Sale which resulted in me ending up in A many times a year.

The cure was to stop the heart briefly with medication before it resumed with its normal beat. Crash teams stood by to make sure it did start up: students stood by to canada goose coats watch me flat line.

The NHS cured me of the condition ten years ago but I still rather miss the drama.

And what seemed so dreadful and depressing when one was young the obituary columns in the local paper: old Ada, 94, peacefully, Canada Goose Outlet with her loving children, grandchildren, great grandchildren at her bedside now seems almost attractive.

I cheap Canada Goose don’t believe in a heaven after we die, not the traditional kind with angels and harps, anyway but I find it hard to believe we just stop. And if I’m wrong I’ll canadian goose jacket know nothing about it anyway, so what’s to worry?

Being old in the 21st century is our great good fortune. We must be thankful. We have the internet if we canada goose can overcome a reluctance to join the new computer world.

It enables the shops to come canadagoosejacketsalesca to us, if we can’t get to the shops.

We can divert ourselves with computer games, be of any age or gender in a virtual world, acquire friends on Facebook and a following on Twitter, and join in the conversation of the buy canada goose jacket world.