So that’s it then, I’m officially old.

I’ve finally achieved the age at which Her Majesty’s Government give me a pension. They’ve renamed it “The State Pension” but it’s still called the “Old-Age Pension”, most notably by relatives and friends who want to irritate me, which, thanks to vanity, they succeed in doing. But Old-Age Pension used to be its official title.

Now how do I come to terms with this - the hour glass having been turned enough times (569,784 and yes, I had to do that) - to clock up sixty-five years? Have a party to share the moment? Yes, ok, done that. Eat and drink more sensibly? I don’t think so. Go out, to buy a pipe and a pair of slippers? Errr, you want me to start smoking again and sit around a lot, no thanks. I know, let me do something outside the box and get a job. Since the whole idea of getting a pension is supposedly to stop working, that would seem to be an appropriately contrarian thing to do.

So I have. And it’s not stacking shelves in the local supermarket for a couple of hours a day either, it’s a full time, full on, engage brain and keep your wits about you job; but more about that another time, this is about dancing with the years.

The next thing is to realize that there is not a d****d thing I can do about it – the physical clocks run on and everything is forced to keep pace with them, there is no escape and no such thing as a time machine. Yet.

Finally, for today, there is the realization that I don’t feel different. Different from what? Well, umm, err, how I used to feel, I think, as far as I can remember. But I do feel different from how my grandparents felt at this age. Both grandfathers had shuffled off, grannie had become a catalogue of aches and pains, albeit an energetic one and I don’t recall grandma in any other pose but seated. As an over-active child, I can recall urging grannie to “do it just once more” whatever "it" may have been, and when wanting to know why the answer was in the negative, getting the response “you’ll know when you get old!” Which led me to ponder how I would know when I had crossed the magic line and become old myself. And then I spotted it. Old people climbed stairs one at a time. In my eight-year-old eyes, there probably wasn’t much difference between being an adult and being old, but I was convinced that the holy grail of age measurement had been found. I had discovered an acid test – when I started climbing stairs in singles, that would be it, no going back, youth would have flown and given way to … what exactly … well another piece of eight-year-old inspiration arrived … oldth.

This is Lebanon, and there are regular power cuts. When I returned from a short errand a few days ago there was no lift, so nothing for it but the stairs. So powerful was that distant revelation that off I set up seven flights, still two at a time!

There hasn’t been a power cut today. Yet.