Who says getting old’s no laughing matter!

He nods off after lunch. Can’t sit down without saying ‘oof’. And his granddaughter’s studying him for a history project. But at 78, CHRISTOPHER MATTHEW’S sense of humour is in gloriously rude health . . .

The hair dye turned my thatch rather orange

The only bit of yoga I really enjoyed was falling asleep

The other day, my 15-year-old granddaughter Tamara rang to say that her latest school project required her to write about a historical figure and she had decided that her subject should be me. ‘Cool,’ i said. i certainly didn’t mean it. Never once have i thought of myself as being from a bygone age. i’m only 78, for goodness sake.

Mind you, it is not uncommon for people of my age to bump themselves up a year or two. i myself have been heard to say i’m nearly 80, perhaps hoping for a reply along the lines of: ‘Well, you certainly don’t look it.’

Fat chance of that. Soon after i hit 70, i was chatting with an elderly man in our village, and for some reason he asked me how old i was. When i told him, he said: ‘Blimey, i thought you were older than that.’

i have to admit that i’m no spring chicken. My left leg still gives me gyp after two hip replacements and i often can’t recall people’s names. i sometimes have a quick snooze at around four in the afternoon, and i have a tendency to utter a slight ‘oof’ noise when i sit down in an armchair, not to mention a breathy groan when i stand up.

But that does not mean i’m old. Getting on a bit, perhaps. But definitely not historical. Yet.

On what do i base this claim? Well, at the time of writing, i can walk without a stick; i can see pretty well without having to wear glasses, though i use them for reading; and i’ve still got a good head of hair.

This is nothing to be proud of. it’s pure genetic luck. My father had hair all his life and there seems every chance that i will, too. like him, i look after my thatch as best i can, although i have still to treat myself to a visit to Trumper’s barbers in Mayfair, the most traditional and exclusive such establishment in london.

As a child, i remember a school chum having his hair cut there. having not uttered a word throughout, his ancient barber leaned forward and murmured into the ear of my friend, then aged eight: ‘Will we be going north for the grouse this year, sir?’

it was just such an old-timer who once talked me into having my greying hairs treated with a light dye. The result of this adventure into rejuvenation was that i ended up prematurely rather orange.

At least i had hair to dye. i do not think i shall ever know what it is to be bald and, with some exceptions, people don’t think i’m old. i know this for a fact because on crowded Tube trains no one offers me a seat, too preoccupied with their iPhones to consider that someone might need to sit down more than them.

Far from being irritated, i am happy to stand the whole way, even with someone’s rucksack jammed into the small of my back and a semibearded face with bad breath inches from my own.

Not only am i invariably the first out through the open doors, but i take the entire length of the nearest up-escalator at a trot that i can only describe as brisk.

All in all, i am enjoying what i like to call late middle age, more or less as i have been doing for the past quarter of a century. i go for walks every day with the dog; i play quite a lot of golf; i sail in my Swallows & Amazons-style dinghy.

i know it can’t last for ever, but while it does, it gives me the chance to look at life in the last lane, as i am now experiencing it, and to consider what might be to come.

in this investigation into incipient old age, i’m reminded of the conversations i had with my friend Alan Coren, a fellow contributor to Punch magazine.

We spoke and laughed about many things, not least Alan’s health. Something of a hypochondriac, he was always finding some new pain or condition that might presage the end, but it usually came to nothing.

One day, though, he was diagnosed with a genuine heart condition. he was on the phone in a trice. ‘You’ll never guess what,’ he said. ‘i’ve actually got something!’

it seemed he had a large, unruptured aneurysm, the cure for which involved clamping off his aorta and sewing in a graft to act as a bridge for his blood flow. it was a great success. he called it his bridge over troubled aorta.

Alan’s death ten years ago made me conscious that anything could come along at any moment to stop me in my tracks, and turn me from a reasonably fit late-middle-aged man with a few aches and pains into a seriously old one.

Now i wonder even more that i might not be using however much time i have left to good purpose and last year i read a magazine article entitled ‘50 things for the over-50s to do’.

Some were clearly not suitable, or even possible. Running for political office, for example (though President Trump is a fellow septuagenarian and Ronald Reagan was my age when he left the White house), or becoming an Olympian, or a magistrate, or a zoo keeper.

But i was enormously cheered to find there were others that i had already tackled at some stage, with varying degrees of success.

Take dancing. in the mid-Fifties, i learned ballroom dancing in classes at the local hotel, taught by a woman who owned a large white poodle. She demonstrated the steps with the poodle standing on its hind legs. Unorthodox, certainly — but it must have been rather effective, because my rumba was the talk of teenage Surrey.

Missing from the list of challenges to keep the older away from the daytime television screen is one of the best loved and most popular, namely the aforementioned game of golf.

One of the things i like most about this sport is an unwritten rule that whenever anything goes wrong, it is never your fault. in his short story Ordeal By Golf, P.G. Wodehouse described the behaviour of a short-tempered young man named Mitchell holmes.

‘The least thing upset him on the links. he missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.’

This ability to explain away your failings is particularly helpful for the older player for whom a round of golf can all too often turn out to be a long walk punctuated by 18 disappointments.

A friend of mine, intrigued by the small crowd gathered at the window of the bar in his golf club, joined them in time to see an elderly golfer hurling his bagful of golf clubs into the middle of a small pond next to the putting green. he then marched off in the direction of the car park.

Very soon afterwards he returned, rolled up his trouser legs and waded into the middle of the pond. he reached down into the water, seized the bag, unzipped the side-pocket, pulled out his car keys, hurled the bag back into the water and marched back to his car.

Alongside golf, i have also started investigating possible exercises that might suit a man of my age — and of my limited interest — in the keep-fit industry.

Mrs Matthew is a big fan of yoga and has been doing it for years. With her encouragement i joined her small class one day and came away realising that the only bit i really enjoyed was at the very end, falling fast asleep with a blanket over me.

Of late, i’ve also tried Tai Chi, encouraged by videos of elderly Chinese citizens moving gracefully through a series of simple movements in the Beijing smog.

Since none involved being in anything other than the standing position i considered this and went along to a class at my nearest sports centre, looking forward to finding a sense of inner peace. What i got was a sharp pain in my lower back.

i’m really beginning to wonder if taking up any form of exercise late in life, if you have not been in the swing of it for years, is really as beneficial as the so-called experts would have one believe.

No one of any age who has ever passed me in the park in full running regalia looks totally happy or really all that well; indeed, the elderly look, at best, as if they are suffering the cruellest excesses of the Spanish inquisition.

Call me a fitness denier, but i’m beginning to wonder if there comes a time in one’s life when one has better things to do with one’s remaining years than worrying about keeping one’s weight down, one’s cholesterol low and one’s heart rate slow.

i didn’t get to the age i am today by fussing about my health. Nor did

P. G. Wodehouse (as you might have gathered, I’m something of a fan).

Even in his 90s, he got up every morning at half-past seven and performed his ‘daily dozen’ — a series of simple stretching exercises he had stuck to every day since 1920 — before settling down to his regular breakfast of toast and honey and tea with a ‘breakfast book’ by a good mystery writer such as Rex Stout or Ngaio Marsh.

If anyone can come up with a more agreeable way of keeping fit as a flea into one’s tenth decade, I’d like to hear about it. But it was another aspect of Wodehouse’s life that perhaps contributed as much to his longevity.

By the time of his death in February 1975, at the age of 93, Wodehouse and his wife Ethel had been married 61 years. Impressive but far from the record set by Phyllis and George Loftus who live in Cannock, Staffordshire.

Phyllis is 94 and George 100 and they recently celebrated their 77th anniversary, making them the longest-married couple in England.

When asked for the secret of a good marriage, Phyllis replied that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

George, we were told, loves nothing better than a good roast dinner on Sunday, and for the rest of the week they have fish or shepherd’s pie, as they have done every night of their marriage.

Ask other elderly couples how they achieved a lifetime of bliss and the answers are charmingly simple. ‘Kissing and hugging’; ‘Sitting and chatting;’ ‘Not arguing about trivial things;’ ‘Having fun together;’ ‘Having a similar sense of humour;’ ‘Sitting down with a cup of tea and talking to each other . . .’

Few who are currently making old bones together would disagree that, once sex has lost its iron grip, there’s no better ingredient for sticking together through thick and thin than the joy of such companionship.

That said, all couples who have been together for a long time have silly arguments about the most trivial things, usually because one or other of them is going deaf and gets the wrong end of the stick.

And while I’ll admit I sometimes can’t hear everything that actors, especially American ones, say on television (for which I blame them — sloppy delivery), so far I have not felt the need for artificial help.

Should that need ever arise, today’s hearing aids are so discreet as to be almost invisible. Few want to flaunt their disability but one who made no bones about his deafness, and even deployed it as a social weapon, was Evelyn Waugh.

Although only 62 when he died, he acquired two large ear trumpets. One, in tortoiseshell, was a gift from the Duchess of Devonshire, which one could attach to one’s head, thus allowing one to eat and drink.

Waugh’s cousin, the communist writer Claud Cockburn, described how Evelyn used this to withering effect at a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon, at which moralising intellectual Malcolm Muggeridge was the main speaker. Within a minute of the unfortunate victim rising to his feet, Waugh had unscrewed the trumpet from his head, placed it on the table in front of him and sat gazing intently at his plate.

With all my own faculties more or less intact, I see no reason yet to give up driving, but at my age, time could be running out, and I am not prepared to waste a nanosecond waiting at a traffic light while the driver in front of me (or, in many cases, several cars ahead) wakes up to the fact the lights have changed.

Others take matters into their hands in no uncertain terms. I remember a friend at school telling me about how his grandfather dealt with such ditherers. If the heavy hand on the horn didn’t achieve the required result, he came up close behind the driver and nudged him gently with his bumper.

Today such eccentricity, as demonstrated by the very old, is as likely as not to be diagnosed as mild dementia, with the person in question being deemed incapable of driving and having their licence revoked.

Time was when it was not unusual for someone like my late motherin-law to climb into her car after a morning’s shopping and wonder why the controls weren’t where they were meant to be, only to realise she had got into the back seat.

At least she was stationary when she discovered her mistake. An old friend of mine was in the passenger seat of his elderly mother’s car when he suggested that she was not negotiating the road quite as carefully as she might.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Am I driving?’

THE Old Man And The Knee: How To Be A Golden Oldie by Christopher Matthew is published by Little, Brown, price £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 (20 per cent discount) visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until November 23.

I am determined to enjoy life in the last lane