Tim Dowling Real age: 49. The age I feel: 39

Tim Dowling
Real age: 49. The age I feel: 39

Tim Dowling: 'Maturity is a pose I can manage from time to time.' Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian I doubt many people over 40 feel as old as they look. For most of us, the face in the mirror is the painting in the attic. When I haven't been in front of my reflection for a while, I forget what my age looks like. The face I imagine I'm peering out from behind is about 10 years younger than the one I catch sight of when my computer screen suddenly goes dark.
It's hard to gauge the age I feel inside: the actual person – a frightened little homunculus – doesn't change much, but the person I'm pretending to be has to recalibrate himself constantly. Maturity is a pose I can manage from time to time only because I know the outer shell is weathered enough to pull it off. Wisdom is easy: look old, say nothing. At the same time, I find that giddiness or irreverence may cause alarm in strangers. If I'm going to play to – or against – the stereotype of someone my age, I have to bear in mind how old I am.
I learned some years ago that what is commonly called a mid-life crisis would be better termed a personal ongoing emergency. In my case it never reached any sort of "crisis"; it just kept getting worse. I have long since given up on the idea of being comfortable in my own skin. I never have been, and I can't see how encroaching infirmity is going to help.
Mine is a generation that believes it is the first to refuse to be circumscribed by middle age. We'll just carry on as before, we think, unhampered by respectability or decorum. I'm pretty certain every generation felt this way – at least with respect to the preceding generation – and thought it was the first to do so. But the restrictions you fear middle age will impose upon you simply aren't in place. At my age, one is free to behave like someone 10 years younger, or 10 years older, and embarrassment is the least of all terrors. You can be anything you want at 50, except cool.
I suppose if I had to put a number to it, I'd say I generally feel about 39. Except on the morning after a long-haul flight, when I feel 100.


Michele Hanson
Real age: 70. The age I feel: 18

Michele Hanson: 'I’m pretending old age isn’t happening.' Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian How old do I feel? It varies. Mentally, I feel between 11 and 18, masquerading as an adult. It's a bit scary, because there's always the risk that I might get found out. Someone might realise that I am not a proper grownup. Even though I'm 70 and a half, maturity never quite happened. But with a bit of luck, people will now confuse it with the sixth age – childish, but not quite at the sans teeth, sans eyes and all the rest of it – and they won't guess I never progressed in the first place. I still like Jackie Wilson and Wilson Pickett, I still wear jeans. I'm pretending old age isn't happening, and in my head it isn't.
Physically, it's also very up and down. If I'm well and the sun's shining, then I feel about 40. I can even run about, sometimes more than I could in my 50s, because of all the practice I've been doing on dog walkies, but if I'm poorly I feel about 103, and if I look in the mirror without my clothes on, then also over 100, rather like a Struldbrug, those poor, tormented creatures in Gulliver's Travels, who grow old, stay old, and never die. Everyone dreaded being a Struldbrug, and I can see why, looking at my drooping, crinkling reflection and yellow dagger toe-nails, which I know will only get worse. So I just take care never to look. But in dim lighting, fully clothed and just after a visit to the hairdresser, and if I remember to stand up nice and straight, I'm 40 again. In the cold, clutching a hot-water-bottle with the bed-socks on, I'm an old lady.
I try hard not to fall over, because sprains, bruises and breaks take longer to heal and remind me that I'm on the road to death and getting closer and closer, at rather a worrying speed. Then my friends start to peg out, or have close shaves, which means lots of hospital visiting, and I'm back up to 90.
But yesterday the sun came out, I climbed a big ladder, on to the flat roof, and sprayed a tree in a sprightly way, had a lovely immature rant about the way the world is going, swore horribly, put on my favourite zebra-patterned shoes, had a dance, both legs worked rather well, and hey presto – 18 again.


Lucy Mangan
Real age: 38. The age I feel: 35

Lucy Mangan: 'The closer I got to my inner age, the happier I became.' Photograph: David Yeo My parents' friend Jenni always used to say I was born 35. I think that's about right. I never enjoyed being a child – I have always been hopeless at the kind of energetic optimism being young requires. I looked forward to the days when an evening's socialising would mean a dinner party rather than being dragged to a nightclub and, better still, when most of the time nobody would expect me to do either and I could sit at home with a book instead.
So the closer I got to my inner age, the happier I became. And though real time has now overtaken it, I'm still in its vicinity and more than content. Being good at being young must be awful. Imagine your happiest years being over before you even knew you had them, before you were old enough to appreciate and enjoy them for what they were. Imagine living a life in which every moment takes you further and further away from your glory days, all your favourite memories receding into an ever more distant past. Imagine being able to say by the age of 18 that your best days are behind you. That seems a high price to pay, even for the most sociosexually adventurous and exultant of teenage years.
I am biased, of course, but being naturally middle-aged seems to me the best of both worlds. The happiness of coming into your kingdom is not so far away as to be unimaginable – even if you first become conscious of the fact when you are not yet allowed to choose your own shoes. It is not so far off that you cannot start to look forward to it immediately.
And then, once your brief period of prime time has passed, when your inner and outer worlds align and you at last find yourself at one with both yourself and your chronological peers and can start breaking out the good china, napery and Ottolenghi, you are not so far from death that your memories will start to turn on you. They will remain near and vivid enough to revive and refresh the spirit rather than so long ago and far away that they become like a patch of dimly glowing embers too far away to warm the heart and kindle happiness anew.
So, up yours, youthful, energetic, optimistic interiors. We lifetime middle-agers win in the end. Up yours.