An old man was looking back at me from the mirror...

It has been a terrible week. I turned 48-years-old on Friday – I woke, looked in the mirror, and saw staring back at me a wizened, grey-haired individual with prostate trouble, watery eyes and slightly yellowing teeth. It was a sobering moment.

Just how old I am was truly brought home to me when my sister arrived with a present. It was very large and for a moment I naively got excited, until I ripped it open to discover inside a fleece-lined dressing gown and slippers.

I looked at her in astonishment. “I’m 48, not 108,” I gasped.

‘I know, but you’re two years away from

50, so,’ – and she said this next bit as if I were slumped in an over-sized armchair in the corner of a nursing home – ‘it’s important you start to keep properly warm in the evenings’. How has this happened? Once I was young and virile and occasionally stayed up beyond 9pm.

Now I wear slippers.

Even my language is out of date. The other day, at the university I work at, I overheard a student say: ‘wow, that’s cold’.

I looked over expecting to see him stood next to a freezer or perhaps touching a three-day-old corpse, but he was watching some football highlights on his phone.

“What do you mean by ‘cold’?” I asked. He looked at me in sympathy, as if I were a stroke victim, and replied: ‘well, you know, it’s what you say when something’s good’.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, I woke on Saturday – my first full day of being 48 – and had a shower. When I bent to wash my legs, something twanged in my back and I fell to the floor.

Mrs Canavan chose this exact moment to send the kids into the bathroom, with the instruction to brush their teeth.

Crawling on all fours and sounding like I was in the throes of a severe asthma attack, I gasped back: ‘not… at… the…’ but couldn’t get the word ‘moment’ out because I was in so much agony.

“Er, mum I think something’s wrong with dad,” Mary, my seven-year-old, said.

“I, I, I…” I replied but couldn’t get any further on account of the crippling pain emanating from the base of my spine and the thought I’d almost certainly have to spend the remainder of my life in a wheelchair sucking my food through a straw.

I spent the remainder of the day slumped on the downstairs couch.

Fortunately Mrs Canavan was very sympathetic and lovingly said things like, ‘suppose I’ve got the bloody kids on my own all weekend now, have I?’ which helped boost my spirits immeasurably.

I have a physio session booked and am very much hoping for some kind of miracle cure.