Everything I do, it seems, will become institutionalised, like pulling the Christmas tree lights out of the attic every year.What will change will be the personnel. Now, at 45, I’m aware of settling into an existential plateau, accepting that this income, this diet, this regimen of work and sleep and parties and reading and holidays and sex and Sunday lunch will spin through my days like a carousel with occasional minor variations. Friends, nephews and nieces, local priests and handymen all came a-calling, chatted to her, cut the grass, made cups of tea and kept her stocked with gossip.Since she died, the whole subject of ageing and “ending up”, far from being a ghastly, depressing thought, has started to fascinate me. The local nuns brought her Victoria sponge cakes and enquired about her wayward son in London. Such is the culture of Irish society, that she survived this reckless experiment.The neighbours ran errands, brought her meals, kept her informed. She was old and had a bowel complaint and was susceptible to loneliness, but she clung to her independence, and insisted on fending for herself in the house she and my father had bought. That was the final revelation of what Time is up to, what the ageing process is bringing us as well as, and instead of, wisdom.She lived as a widow for 12 years in Oranmore, a small dormitory town near Galway.

Accelerated by the cancer in her stomach, it laid waste to her face and body, covering her hands with liver-coloured blotches, making of her beautiful face a Monument Valley of sharp crevices and bluffs and secret folds, an unexpected new territory of stricken flesh. “Don’t you dare call me such a thing,” she snapped in real fury.She went on busily living for 12 years after my father died, surfing the rolling years with infinite equilibrium Time, when it caught up with her, took a terrible revenge. I once found her, aged 84, dragging a heavy dustbin through her front garden to await the refuse collectors “For goodness sake, Ma,” I said, “Let me do that You’re an old lady.” Her eyes blazed. Until our last Christmas together, she was unchangingly herself, sharp-eyed, lean-faced, ginger-haired and tough, Dame Barbara Castle’s younger sister. And it’s a face that, by and large, will remain that way until the accelerated collapse when you’re 70 or 80, provided you aren’t run over, or called in for “exploratory tests”, next week.My mother died this March, at 87.

Everyone at 50, declared George Orwell, has the face he deserves. So it’s some comfort to think that, though I was an unconvincing teenage groover, I’ve evolved into my natural identity as a clapped-out old roue.There is one consideration, however, that stops you in your tracks It’s knowing that this is how you’ll be until the end. Look on this picture and on that, you say: the studenty prat in the sweaty ringlets at 19; the callow, smirking journalist, like a draper’s assistant, in his first proper job at 28; the filled-out, languid fop at 40 in the Oscar Wilde hat; and you argue that evolution is heading the right way, shedding these foolish, unfocused identities like so many layers of dead skin You can buy the theory that everyone has a perfect age Some people are natural 18-year-olds Some were always meant to be 26 Some greet 40 with a cry of recognition Some are eternally 68. If I stay up carousing past 4am these days, the bags under my eyes next morning are the size of steamer trunks; one day, they’ll move into my face and stay there.You can try, Hopper-like, to celebrate the liberation that comes with age. I’ve developed a curious habit of pressing an index finger against my temple while talking, as though giving my foggy thoughts a symbolic massage.