"What a drag it is getting old," sang Mick Jagger in "Mother's Little Helper" when he was about 12 years old, the insensitive bastard. Well, he's wrong. I reflect on my age as I pass the time by filling in some stupid online survey by National Rail (don't get me started) and discover that I am now in the penultimate age bracket before you have to tick the "60-to-dead" box.

Ageing has its unforeseen benefits. When I was much younger indeed, I used to be amused by an American book of my parents' called Flipsville - Squaresville, which humorously listed the differences between parents and teenagers. One half of the book was intended to mock teenagers; you turned it over and the other half did the same for adults. Just as one of the defining moments in the ageing process comes when you realise that you have more sympathy for the parents than the daughter in the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home" (running off with a man from the motor trade? The hussy), so I now find that what was meant to be risible in adults is actually rather pleasurable.

For example, one of the things in the book that teenagers noticed about adults was the way they would just sit around "making all kinds of dopey noises". This observation was accompanied by a not unfunny drawing of a middle-aged couple sitting in armchairs going "hmm", "wee", "pfft", etc.
Now, sitting around making all kinds of dopey noises is something I happen to be getting rather good at. And now that I am living with a man the same age as me, this habit is, I fear, getting out of control. Making dopey noises for no really good reason at all was about number 36 in the list of reasons why my wife wanted to get rid of me, and even my children started to complain about it, but living with someone who has reached the same point in the cammin di sua vita as I have, it is as if there's some kind of competition going on between us.

Listen to us from the other side of the door, and wonder what it is we are doing that could elicit such groans, such gasps and turbid exhalations. Are we trying to lift a sofa unaided? Vividly recalling, with profound shame, a disgraceful episode from the night before? Wondering what it is in our lives we have done wrong, or failed to do? No - we are sitting down. You should hear me when I'm pulling off my Chelsea boots. You'd think there was a lion in the room.

And you should hear the noise Razors makes when he sees an attractive woman on the television. It's a low, subterranean, sustained Neanderthal growl that seems to come from the very pit of his being. I am reminded of Malcolm Muggeridge's remark that the greatest thing about old age was the end of sexual desire, living with which had been like being tethered to a wild animal. Well, that wild animal is now very much alive, living in the Hovel with me, and particularly audible when the woman who reads the London news on the BBC comes on.

Minicab driver or drug dealer?

For the old, left to their own devices, and without the hand of example and simple good manners to restrain them, take great pleasure in these outbursts. They constitute, in fact, one of life's great pleasures for those of us with scant financial resources and a lot of time on our hands. We have reached that awkward time in life, Razors and I, when we are too young to go bouncing around shamelessly like Janet Street-Porter and too old to be automatically considered as potential objects of desire by random strangers. Razors told me how mortified he was when he went to a nightclub once and was approached by a pretty girl.

“Wahey," he said to himself, "I still have it." The girl then asked, "Are you the minicab?" When he said he wasn't, she asked if he had any drugs. Cab driver or drug dealer; these, apparently, were the only circumstances that would account for his presence. And the punchline to that story is that it happened a good 15 years ago. (I got banned from nightclubs some time before that by my wife.)

So, sitting around making dopey noises it is, then. May I also recommend saying "tsk" from time to time? It's a very satisfying noise of disapproval, and is what Mrs Brady - Old Lady says in the comic magazine Viz. Actually, she's not looking so bad these days.

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