AS one for whom a half-full glass is almost always half-empty, I think it's worth asking what the over-50s have to look forward to.

History offers many examples of people who, after their three score years or so, either embarked from scratch on the activity for which everyone remembers them, or kept their best till last.

It would be silly to think that, in the ludicrous parlance of today, '60 is the new 40'.

I seem to recall that reaching 40 made many of my friends throw their hands in the air and invite the Grim Reaper round for tea, just to let him know that their time, if not 'nigh', was just below the embankment.

Ours is the first generation to discover that younger people are not automatically solicitous towards their elders and betters.

That's because we don't sit rheumily by the fire dispensing salty wisdom and asking if there's anything worth listening to on the 'wireless'.

No - with our released equity and sundry other funds, we are more likely to be spending the money that our sons and daughters 30 years ago would have considered theirs by right, so long as they were willing to behave themselves and wait.

We are now the ones feeling sorry for them, with their prospect of having to work till they are 80, their longer hours on the treadmill, their inability to buy a house for the first time, their job insecurity and their exposure to the most vacuous pop music ever.

Old people don't look old any more.

Long before they were superannuated, my grandfathers always gave the appearance of being long in the (false) tooth because their bodies had been skewed by dawn-to-dusk labour.

I believe the much-vaunted lifestyle of subsistence (no nanny to create a nanny state then, though in later life they both fought for it) actually gave them little time for any kind of meaningful reflection, which was why Non-Conformist preachers had an easy time of it in closing the circle of their lives.

And it makes me angry to think that both probably died of a disease that today might be detected early through screening, making the biblical imperative of 'three score years and ten' less a reason for not looking forward.

I often think, despite an inherited pessimism, that we should live the lives which in others close to us were curtailed.

I've always been one for more life.

Two years ago I interviewed TV presenter Angela Rippon to mark the publication of her book on how to look fit at 50.

It takes guts to set yourself up as a walking advertisement for your own outlook on life, if only for the reason that someone might want to check up on you in ten years to see if everything's working.

In ten years I shall be collecting the Man Booker prize for the best novel in the world and going solo up the Amazon, armed with only a stout club and an SAS manual on how to distil your own urine and live for a month on roast marmoset.

But only if that half-empty glass can persuade me that it's merely a stage on the way to being topped up.