Why this old gal is still so merry!

WHEN you’re getting older, birthdays are like notches on a gun belt . . . another one — pow! That’s how I’ll feel on Tuesday when I sit in a restaurant in Bath with my family and just one friend this time. Bring on the vodka and wine!

The quotation I’ve picked this week is about accepting who you are, for better for worse. That doesn’t mean you can’t change or shouldn’t try to, because our lives should be a continuous process of evolution. And that’s glorious, even if change often involves pain.

But it does mean that looking back and regretting is a waste of the precious time we have left. Recently, a colleague asked me if I’d have done things differently. No, I said, why would I?

Last week, I went to a party in London to launch a reprint of an elegant glossy book about NOVA Magazine, an unrepeatable publishing icon of 1965-75. It was my first staff job when I was 24.

So, there at the bash, were six or seven former colleagues, retired and rather grey now (not me — I colour my hair!) but all celebrating our shared special ‘moment’.

The years just seemed to fall away. I can picture that Nova office as it was; relive the raucous Christmas parties; visualise us all piling over to the Coal Hole (a pub on the Strand) for a ‘meeting’; hear the relentless clack of our typewriters; remember one lunch I had with the star journalist Irma Kurtz that consisted of four double Bloody Marys each, followed by wine — and no food.

I remember the flirting, the brainstorming, the helpless laughter, the camaraderie — and always the cigarette smoke curling up to the ceiling.

No one judged anyone else; our broadmindedness was a million miles away from today’s culture of offence and disapproval. Why, a vicar once groped my thigh . . . but that’s another story.

Those were the days, my friend, and boy, did we live ’em. And that’s why this old gal is still so merry.

Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, london W8 5TT, or email bel. mooney@dailymail.co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.