Youth may be wasted on the young, but longevity is certainly not squandered on the old. It is not just today - when Lucian Freud paints, or Doris Lessing writes, or the Queen and Nelson Mandela criss-cross the world as jauntily as gap-year travellers - that we see evidence of how some of the best tunes are played on old fiddles.

Titian was at his best as he inched towards 80, even though his eyesight was failing and he was painting with his fingers because he was too frail to hold a brush. At 85 Gladstone was massaging the second Home Rule Bill for Ireland through Parliament before returning home to translate Horace odes. Ronald Reagan was running the world's most powerful country in his late seventies. Who knows? John McCain might be, too.

Tolstoy learnt to ride a bicycle at 67. Toscanini was conducting orchestras into his eighties. Cato took up Greek at 80. Plutarch was not much younger when he started learning Latin. P.G.Wodehouse published a Jeeves novel at 90.

Today The Times joins Sir Sigmund Sternberg in launching an award not to congratulate, but to celebrate, older people in Britain who continue to contribute to the flavour of our lives, whether through the arts, science, business or some other field (see page 26). These are men and women who regard ageing as something best left to wine; people who are not so much ageing as ripening.

Groucho Marx was being funny, but unfair, when he quipped that anyone can get old, all you have to do is live long enough. Why not echo, instead, Lady Diana Cooper's view: “First you are young; then you are middle-aged; then you are old; then you are wonderful.” And so what if it takes you a minute longer to rise from the sofa?

Click here for details on how to nominate your champions of the new golden age