“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head.
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

There are many things wrong with the way we treat old people in the 21st century, but at least we live in an age in which elderly athletes are less likely to become the butt of heartless comic versiflage by whimsical clergymen than to find themselves popular heroes, stars of the newspapers and television cameras - at least until the mouldy old Guinness Book of Records tarnished the glory for the centenarian marathon-runner Buster Martin by saying that it suspected he was no such thing, but a mere stripling of 94.

I imagine that once you're within sight of three figures it must become easy to lose track of a few years here and there - God knows, it's happening to me already, and I'm half Buster's age. But only the most mean-minded of statisticians would nitpick about the footling extra seven candles that may or may not have crept on to the old chap's last birthday cake - that he is ancient and still moving briskly about is the interesting bit. Whether or not he's had his telegram from the Queen is surely a mere technicality.

Buster may have made a slowish time in the London Marathon, and failed to seize the speedy senior's record from 98-year-old Dimitrion Yordanidis, who finished in Athens in 1976 with a time of 7 hours, 33 minutes. But if he does turn out to have been a bit vague about his precise date of birth, he can at least take consolation from the fact that it places him in the vanguard of an interesting new trend - let us call it the upwardly mobile elderly.

Many of us spend our lives in a state of confusion when it comes to defining our real age. There is chronological age - the one on which our birth certificate cruelly insists. And there is what you might call “internal” age - the one we feel ourselves to be inside. Until now the traditional pattern has been to want to be older through childhood and adolescence - ask most small children how old they are, and unless it's their birthday, the answer will be not “I'm six”, but “I'm nearly seven”. As for one's teens, when the days and weeks creep by, slow as cold treacle: oh, the amount of time you spend wishing your youth away. Longing to be 17, so that you can drive. Longing to be 18, so that you can gain legitimate entry into that forbidden fleshpot of all human pleasures - Desperado's Nightclub and Bar - without being rebuffed by the bristly doorman with slighting references to your beardless chin, milk-fed appearance, etc.

Then you get to 21, and suddenly time picks up the pace and starts fleeting. Before you know it you're 30, 40 and - cripes! - 50, and your teenage children start saying, “Oh. My. God. Tell me you're not going out in that?” when you put on the little Topshop wrap dress that seemed, in the shop, so appropriate to your real (internal) age of - oooh, 27 at most. By now you have begun, if not actually lying about your age, at least drifting about in a cloud of chronological ambiguity - celebrating birthdays in a non-age-specific way. Recycling the cards sent by your tactless relations with YOU'RE 40 TODAY!!! CONGRATULATIONS, OLD GIRL!!! emblazoned on the front in pink glitter. And so on.

If you were to plot a graph of chronological against internal age it would follow a graceful serpentine curve, real exceeding internal until the early twenties, thereafter dipping ever more vertiginously as the age for corrective surgery and the grey-covering rinse advances. But here's a thing: the curve of the graph seems to be doing a bit of a wriggle. The population, we know, is ageing; the balance of economic power shuffling steadily from young to middle-aged to frankly old. We know this in theory, but of real signs there has been until now something of a shortage: impossible to open a magazine or turn on the telly without finding some person of indeterminate gender and completely rigid face urging you to engage in all sorts of humiliating extremities in order to look Ten Years Younger. (I always like to watch the faces of the spouses on these programmes when their loved one appears in full rejuvenated fig. They are invariably stricken.)

But at last there comes evidence that fashion is following the money. Courtney Love has had her nice big nose put back, after deciding that her diminutive “nosejobby” replacement just wasn't her. A Desperate Housewife forswears Botox, saying that she prefers a “natural look”. Crikey, imagine if the whole of Hollywood followed her example and manifested themselves as nature intended - give or take a dab of concealer.

When I was little and keen to be older I had a grandmother with the same ambition: “Now I'm nearly 80,” she'd say in her well-preserved sixties. “Now I'm almost 90 ...” And back came the answering chorus of praise about how marvellous she looked for her age. The older I get, the more inspired this stratagem seems. Why go to all the pain and expense of surgery to make yourself look ten years younger when you can achieve the same effect by the effortless means of upping your age by a few years and waiting for the admiration to pour in?

“This is what 50 looks like,” said Gloria Steinem, crushing some chap who'd had the temerity to compliment her on looking good for her age. Ho yus. And this is what 60 looks like. And 70, now I come to think about it. And this is me, winning the London Marathon aged 100-and-something. You can't expect me to remember at my age. God, the awfulness of being young. I wouldn't go back for anything. You'll have to go away now. It's time for me to do my headstand ...

What news to learn the muse was real
One of the hazards of advancing age is the shattering of illusions. So imagine my chagrin when I read on the front page of this paper yesterday that Miss Joan Hunter Dunn was a real person. I had thought her until now a figment of John Betjeman's busy imagination. If only I had read Volume 1 of Bevis Hillier's life of Betjeman, I should have known that the “Joan Hunter Dunn (imaginary figure)” who appears in the index is nothing of the kind. The Hampshire doctor's daughter with the “open, riant face”, compared by our obituarist to Hogarth's Shrimp Girl, really existed. Honestly, I couldn't be more put out if I'd stumbled across the obituaries of Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil in the august pages of The Times Register.

I suppose I must be suffering from an extreme retroversion of the tendency by which modern literary critics love to unearth the real-life originals of fictional characters. In Diana Athill's recent memoir of old age, Somewhere Towards the End, she says she has “gone off novels” and now prefers facts, but I have not yet reached that highly evolved state of being. I am glad that the real Joan Hunter Dunn lived a long, happy and useful life, but I'm still completely disconcerted by the solidifying of the subaltern's summer fantasy into corporeal reality.

Moonflowers
Quick! Let us retreat to the Moon, on which scientists now think it may be possible to grow marigolds. The European Space Agency has apparently succeeded in cultivating the flowers in a medium of crushed anorthosite, which resembles the lunar surface. The plants look awfully weedy, but never mind. Compared with photographs earlier this week, of the Earth bristling with interplanetary rubbish, the idea of looking up at a Moon swathed, Little Prince-style, in cottage garden annuals seems like a great horticultural leap for Mankind.

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