What will Bruce Forsyth enjoy in the next decade, now he has turned 80? It’s certainly great what you can get away with

It was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother who first alerted me to the possibility that I might be on the threshold of my best decade yet. I had been her Lady-in-Waiting for 35 years, so I suggested that now I had reached the august age of 80, it was time to retire.

“Congratulations,” she said. (She was 98 at the time.) “You will feel marvellous.” How right she was.

I had not thought much about how I might feel at 80. Thus far it had seemed that, when you reached certain watersheds such as 50 or 70, you felt very much the same and you just carried on. I hadn’t imagined that I might find myself entering a Golden Age. If I had thought about it at all, I had imagined you started to feel senile and useless.

I was aware that I was a member of a generation that stood to benefit from the rapid, in fact staggering, advances made by medical science. We could go on living with new hips, hearts, knees and eyes, not to mention a large choice of life-saving pills.

But I was also conscious that, wonderful as these developments were, in many cases they prolonged life without many safeguards as to the quality of that life, and the downside meant prolonged suffering for many people.

I had had much exposure to this when writing letters on the Queen Mother’s behalf. Many of those who wrote to her were elderly. Some were locked into lonely housing situations, often frightened and threatened by yobbish neighbours. Others had found friends and security in an old people’s home, only to be told by some arbitrary authority that their home would close and their way of life would be upended. And, of course, for many, great physical hardships eclipsed any joy. But lots of people do live to enjoy relatively good health, given a longevity family gene and some good luck, and I was one of them.

We octogenarians were born before television, penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, plastic and the pill. We got married and then lived together (how quaint can you be?). We thought “fast food” was what you ate in Lent and a Big Mac was an oversized raincoat. We had never heard of tape decks, or yoghurt. For us the term “making out” referred to how you’d done in your exams, a stud was something that fastened a collar to a shirt and “going all the way” meant staying on a double-decker bus to the bus depot. In our day, smoking was fashionable, grass was mown, a joint was a piece of meat and pot was something you cooked it in.

So we’ve come a long way. What’s it like, 80 years on? Initially, you don’t wake up on your birthday feeling any different from the day before. But gradually you realise that other people’s perception of you has changed. They are apt to be surprised that you are still alive, find it impressive that you can still talk quite sensibly, and amazing if you can walk too. It begins to dawn on you that being 80 may be more fun than being 60 or 70. Then, if you complain, others think you are just disgruntled. But at 80 you can flaunt your hearing aids, as well as discuss their digital miracles (and impress others that you know the word digital). Whereas once your children thought you were behind the times, they now boast of your dazzling prowess, and that you think Elton John is the horse that won the Derby is much enjoyed by them all.

There are other advantages, too. You can be extravagant, explaining that if you don’t spend the money it will only go in death duties, and you can refuse politely to go and stay anywhere that doesn’t have an en suite bathroom. But best of all: clothes no longer matter. You can even wear comfortable, low-heeled walking shoes (the wrong colour) to a cocktail party: refreshingly rare in themselves because, for the first time in your life, you can admit that you loathe them and leave at once. You are also, at last, no longer scared of making a fool of yourself. Early in my eighties, after retirement, I broke my ankle, just as I was rather smugly thinking to myself how fit I was. I was walking in the woods in Scotland, alone with some lofty thoughts, and I slipped on a piece of mud. All of a sudden, I came face to face with the fact that at 80-plus I was sitting on a mudpat unable to move and dependent on the hope that at some moment during the evening my family would realise that I was missing and, with luck, find me. I was lucky - a family of tourists beat them to it.

Memories can be a source of pleasure. With luck, and possibly a little good management, bad ones can be forgotten or mitigated. And while wartime memories are not wholly pleasant, they remain a potent part of our psyche, and it is possible to reflect that had we not, as a generation, “stood alone”, it could all have been much worse. Recently, I confessed to a taxi driver that I felt ashamed of accepting a subsidised fare (which the old in London are given). He patted my arm and said: “Don’t you worry, love, your lot earned it.”

It can be fun to remember life as it was, but the dismal oldie who bemoans the past is in for a frustrating time. Often it is the past generations who have sown the seeds that make these latter developments inevitable. Beating the drums of “the good old days” should be muted. Just as often as the elderly rather resent children (who, it must be admitted, can make more noise at times than one can bear gracefully), old people can easily annoy the young - as this letter to The Times pointed out: “Sir, As a child I regarded elderly people as upholders of the standards of common courtesy and behaviour towards others. Now in our thirties, my wife and I increasingly observe that senior citizens are displaying poor manners. They often fail to acknowledge a door held open for them or the offer of a seat on a train; we are regularly jostled in queues by “oldies” who appear unwilling to wait their turn. Have I become intolerant or is the present generation of senior citizens less polite?”

I remember well the days when I might have felt the same way, when the doings of the afternoon relentlessly took over, fetching the children from school, and never finding the time to be punctual or to fit everything in. I used to long for an afternoon when you could just sit with a book and possibly go to sleep in a chair. Now I can, and I do it with a vengeance. It’s a rich feeling.

It must be admitted that there is one necessary ingredient to make it almost easy to enjoy one’s old age, and that is to have the support of a family of all ages. And although friends die and are all missed, young friends come and often take their places. Although never quite the same, they do have the merit of changing your angle or perception and keeping your mind on the present and even the future.

In the end, we are old. There is no evading it. For me, Dame Mary Warnock surmises the feeling perfectly. “I love self-indulgently reading diaries I kept in 1940, a world infinitely remote. I know there are things I shall never do and things I shall never see again. But it bothers me curiously little that I shall never ever go to Kashmir, or live in an exquisite Queen Anne house [or] even [do] the things I truly loved, such as having babies, playing in an orchestra…or sex. I think with pleasure that I understand them without inappropriate hankering. And I am hugely grateful not to have to bother whether what I eat or drink is healthy or whether I am the right weight.” She goes on to describe this time of life as a second adolescence. She says that adolescence was a time of no responsibility, as well as being a time of discovery, of poetry music and “Wordsworthian sentiments about nature”. I drink to that. All these things, and far more, seem so much fresher once you settle for old age and have the time and solitude to enjoy them.

I was asked the other day what my “plans for the future” were. It was hard not to giggle. Obviously, death is my future, but people seem to think that if you don’t mention it, it will go away. It is not death that scares me, though, but its ante-room: I do fear being sustained in a zombie-like state, thanks to the advance in medical science, well past my natural death date.

But “amidst life is death” and that is as it has always been. Of my own family of seven siblings only I survive. So it’s not a new idea. But for us, perhaps, death is an easier concept to grasp, because we have been nurtured and sustained all of our lives by our Christian faith, which led us to the belief in the afterlife and hope of reunion. I hope my funeral will be cheerful and that the coffin will be carried out to the tune of the Regimental March of the Black Watch, Highland Laddie, to alert my husband that I am on my way. That is my “plan for the future” and it makes me smile.

The Rich Spoils of Time, by Frances Campbell-Preston, £17.95, is published by Dovecote Press

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