My age is just starting to sink in - as is my face.

Two things that make me feel young: Jerry Brown is Governor of California and Nana Mouskouri, my father's favourite, sang in Bucharest at the weekend looking from the posters unchanged.




Here are some thoughts on middle age.





50 years: here's a time when you have to separate yourself from what other people expect of you, and do what you love. Because if you find yourself 50 years old and you aren't doing what you love, then what's the point? ~ Jim Carrey


“Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.” ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you. ~ Agatha Christie


When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
Samuel Johnson


By the time we are 50, we are definitely in the suburbs of mortality.


Alain de Botton.


The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits. ~ Hervey Allen

Getting older only matters if you don't feel good in yourself.
Matthew Bourne, choreographer, born 13 January 1960


Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
~ William Feather

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.
~ Benjamin Haydon

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
~ Anita Brookner

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
~ Virginia Woolf

Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.
~ Edward Young


Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.
~ Victor Hugo


I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
~ Wendy Cope


Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.
~ Alexander Herzen

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.
~ Edward Hoagland

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty, but it's up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.
~ Coco Chanel

You take all the experience and judgement of men over fifty out of the world and there wouldn't be enough left to run it.
~ Henry Ford

Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life. 
~ Daniel Francois Esprit Auber

By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves. 
~ Marie Dressler 

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
- Madeleine L'Engle

I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent. 
~ Wendy Cope

At forty innocence is stupidity. 
- Someone writing about Guy Crouchback in Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy

Life begins at fifty. Everything before is just a preparation. 
- Someone somewhere on the internet