What’s the best age to be?

By Valerie Grove

We live in a madly age-conscious age. Birthday mania naturally starts in childhood, with magicians and bouncy castles. But even grown-up birthdays have now ballooned into fancy-dress extravaganzas, often themed and sometimes refusing to be over in a single day. The artist Tracey Emin marked her 50th birthday in July in a French chateau with a party that lasted several days, culminating in a dinner for 100. Barn dances and boogie nights get even more popular at 60th and 65th celebrations, when ageing rockers bop the night away trying to ape Mick Jagger (now 70 himself). In September the nimble-footed, piano-playing Harvey McGregor QC, former warden of New College, Oxford (87), is hosting a ball for his friends John Davy (80) and Pippa Irwin (95). Dancing—to Coward and Gershwin—obligatory; carriages at midnight.

"Nothing has changed so much in our age as our age," as the writer Polly Devlin put it. "We don’t look like older people used to." Grandmothers once wore grey buns and sat nodding by the fire. Now they go out tangoing or tap-dancing. When another writer, Charlotte Hough, was given a prison sentence in the 1980s for aiding a desperately ill friend to commit suicide, there was widespread outrage that an "old lady" had been sent to Holloway. Hough was 60. Her daughter Deborah Moggach, now 65, flies around London on her bike, hair streaming, stilettos in her saddle-bag.