I would be lying if I even attempted to pretend that this forthcoming season did not have a massively important prize at the end of it. The Lions in South Africa is something that you know you should not think about, but I would suggest that it would be hard to find a single British or Irish player who hasn’t got that thought tucked away somewhere not too deep.

The challenge — for me anyway — is to keep things simple. Yes, the Lions is enormously important, but the point for me is that it is at the end of the season and if I want good things to come to me at the end of the season, then I need to be doing good things throughout it.

It’s actually just a variation of the old sporting cliché: perform well and the result will look after itself. For me, if I perform well, then I would hope the invitation to South Africa might follow too.

That is obviously a big “if” and no one needs to remind me that I am now 29 years old and have been playing professional rugby for 11 of them. However, I remain true to myself in that whatever challenge I face, I remain optimistic and I do still fervently believe that the best of me is yet to come.

As I have been informed — particularly by my great friend and adviser Steve Black — you can be at your physical peak from 29 to 35. I have never looked at age as a limiting factor anyway. I have spent most of my playing life with team-mates older than me. I was the youngest in the entire 2003 squad, which was packed with players hitting their peak in their thirties. Just think of Johnno. Or of Rob Andrew, whom I played outside when I started at Newcastle Falcons and was well into his thirties — even if he does still look 21.

That said, I have really become aware this last year of the divide between generations in the game, between the young and the old. Both ends of the spectrum can clearly thrive — the likes of Mike Catt, Martin Corry and Phil Vickery, right, are shining examples of one end. What they really teach players like me is not that they are a few birthdays farther down the road than myself, but that they have learnt so many lessons along the way.

My hope is that I have taken on board the appropriate lessons too. I believe I have. My concern would be that I have left many of my best days in the past five years in the gym and not on the pitch. But I have also been through a big learning process — of which I have written before in this newspaper — and my rugby is now more about enjoyment and less about fear and I believe that that will enable me to follow Catt et al and be another proud standard- bearer for senior citizenship.

So I am really looking forward to getting this season started and Newcastle Falcons is a great place to be. I understand that, to the outsider, Falcons might seem a tough place to be — there has been management upheaval this year and we have lost key players such as Matt Burke, Mathew Tait and Toby Flood. However, though we clearly miss those players — and I wish them all the best — we couldn’t have a more positive feeling. We really believe that everything can come good.

And yes, if you dug out my pre-season comments from years past, you may probably find that I have said something similar. But here’s why we believe it: because we are a team who know we are capable of big performances, we’ve proved that in previous seasons, we’ve been inches from bettering the top-of-the-table teams and that is really empowering.

Our downfall in recent years, it seems, is that we’ve struggled to build momentum. We’ve had a few good weeks and then we’ve let things slip. To be one of those top-table teams, you have to create that winning feeling and then build on it. If the winning spirit is right, it can be self-perpetuating: the more you win, the better you feel and the right kind of self-confidence breeds success.

We don’t seem to have quite managed to get ourselves to that stage, but we have certainly been near to it and we see no reason why we shouldn’t go there this year.