The secret to a happy old age? Just keep calm and carry on!

IONCE knew a wonderful lady on the isle of Scalpay in the Outer Hebrides. We called her Ciorstag Ruairaidh. Into great old age she did her own baking. Kept tabs on a rake of children, all over the world, by a telephone with buttons the size of Minstrels, dialling multi-digit numbers from memory.

And, every year, summoned her more local daughters to help with the spring cleaning. One year they were too slow and slack for her and she barked that they really ought to get a shift on. ‘Mam, mam,’ they whimpered, ‘you’re forgetting that we’re in our seventies.’

‘Your seventies! I was leaping the hills in my seventies…’ Ciorstag Ruairaidh finally, rather reluctantly, died in the summer of 2006 at the splendid age of a hundred and ten. The chief mourner was her eldest daughter, a mere 87.

I can only imagine the grand old lady’s cackles at the news the Queen had, ever so pleasantly, declined the award of Oldie of the Year. Apparently, at 95, she still regards herself as something of a spring chicken.

‘Her Majesty believes you are as old as you feel,’ as her Assistant Private Secretary gently broke the news to Gyles Brandreth. ‘As such the Queen does not believe she meets the relevant criteria to be able to accept and hopes you will find a more worthy recipient.

‘This message comes to you with Her Majesty’s warmest best wishes.’

This has never been a family eager to wilt into safe, lazy, fluffy-bedjacketed old age. At 103, the Queen’s late aunt, Princess Alice, was dashing off incandescent letters to save the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

At 90, chuckling over The Oldie’s offer, Prince Philip cracked that ‘it is nice to be remembered at all’.

THE Queen went to the trouble, a quarter of a century back, to have a Stannah stairlift installed at the Royal Lodge for the Queen Mother. The old duck accepted it graciously – and majestically refused to use it.

And so deeply, still, do we think of the heir to the throne as a young man it is hard to credit that, come November 14, he will be 73.

There are two ways to handle ageing: serene, incremental acceptance, and denial entire.

The Queen has gone the wise, incremental road, and I am old enough to remember some of the baby steps.

The frisson, back in the 1970s, when she first opened Parliament with reading glasses on.

Her decision, from 1986, not again to preside over Trooping The Colour riding her old mare Burmese, in uniform and sidesaddle. Burmese retired and Her Majesty, ever cost-conscious – there are delicious tales of her roaming palaces to switch off unnecessary lights – saw no value in training another horse.

These days she only rides fat little fell ponies.

She has not worn her crown to the State Opening of Parliament since 2016 and last week, for the first time, she was seen using a walking stick at a London engagement.

In some ways she has remained her own woman. She has refused ever to wear a hard hat when riding and, if driving on her own land, will not wear a seatbelt. Cigarettes are still provided for guests and it was only last year it was made known she would not again wear real fur in public.

Yet the monarchy has one of the world’s best websites, the Queen is adept on her mobile phone and, through you-knowwhat, has become a natural at the video call, her face as expressive as ever and her humour no less wry.

‘Hello. Are you well?’ asked retired terrorist Martin McGuinness on meeting her for the second time in June 2016. ‘Well, I’m still alive,’ she replied pleasantly, taking his hand.

Earlier this month, too, it was reported that the Queen no longer drinks. She is anxious to remain in top fettle for her unprecedented Platinum Jubilee, next year. There is a more poignant reason, too: her daily snifter, a very dry martini, was always mixed for her by Philip.

She tried for some months to keep up the habit, but could no longer bear the spectacle of someone else stirring it.

And, on doctor’s advice and with great reluctance, she this week cancelled another Northern Ireland engagement.

The wise adapt to ageing – and from an early point. I was fortunate that I began losing my hair before I was 20, thought nothing of it, and cropped the lot regularly by the time I was 30.

FOR decades I never took a holiday. Now I always take at least one week off a year. When writing a book, I used to go on extraordinary marathons, sometimes as many as 11,000 words daily. Now I never write more than two or three hours a day, and the work (and I) are better for it.

I was tested for my first varifocals when I had to be, though it was a long time, after one tumble too many, before I accepted I was too old, now, to pull on my socks while standing up.

It’s cool, of course, to be old enough to remember old money; the Strome ferry; the resignation of Richard Nixon; the deaths of Éamon de Valera and Chairman Mao; when teachers still wore black academic gowns; and when a Snickers bar was still called a Marathon.

But it is difficult to feel old at all when I have parents in their eighties still, as Ciorstag Ruairaidh would exult, all but leaping the hills.

My father seems to write three books a year and every year harvests a goodly crop of potatoes. My mother yet scampers about Morningside, fashionably and beautifully dressed; launders our clothes faster than we can wear them, reads three papers a day and whips up delicious dinners.

Yet, as the Queen accedes delicately to age, she still embodies the values of her age.

Duty, dignity, church-going, an utter lack of vanity or selfabsorption, entire immunity to self-pity, and her legendary discretion. We know so little of what she really thinks about anything and, while she takes her role with the utmost seriousness, she is personally, utterly unassuming.

Once a lass was chatting with her at a royal garden party when, to the young woman’s entire horror, her mobile phone started raucously to ring.

‘You’d better answer that,’ said the Queen solemnly. ‘It might be someone important.’