One of the survey’s directors, Professor Andrew Oswald, put it plainly: ‘By the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old.’ The ‘happiness curve’ is the popular term given to the 2008 University of Warwick/Dartmouth College survey of two million people in 80 nations which found a consistent pattern following a U-shaped curve, with happiness higher towards the start and end of our lives.
I’m far from unique in becoming happier with age. Not only am I unbothered by what I lost, but as I contemplate the trail leading into the unknown forest of senescence, I feel perkier than I have at any point since the turn of the century. But – like a catchy song with a false ending – yesterday I celebrated the birthday which the Beatles saw as the number epitomising old age: 64. You bet I felt smug.Īs I contemplate the trail leading into the unknown forest of senescence, I feel perkier than I have at any point since the turn of the centuryīy the end of that year, I’d lost my book contract and my column and was effectively a pariah, having committed the very senior crime of misbehaving on Twitter rather in the manner of a drunk and disorderly OAP in charge of a rogue vehicle. After some years in the wilderness (albeit a very luxurious wilderness, having been living the high life for a decade due to selling my house to a developer for a lot of money) I had a newspaper column and a book contract. But there was also a general feeling that my value was in some way intrinsically bound up with my extreme youth.įast-forward to the day I turned 60, when I woke up in an Art Deco flat with the sea at the bottom of the street, married to a man (third time lucky) who could still make me laugh after a quarter of a century. Yes, some of this had to do with marrying the first man I had sex with the idea that I was only ever meant to do the deed with him alone appalled me beyond words. Having achieved my dream – becoming a published writer – at the tender age of 17, I thought it was all downhill from there. On my 20th birthday, I locked myself in the bathroom of my bungalow in Billericay and cried.
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