Sir Mick Jagger, 83, has just much-reportedly declared that "there's nothing good" about growing old and Mr Ian Warden, 80, almost completely agrees with him.
Coincidentally the conservative writer and wit Dr Theodore Dalrymple, 76, has a typically dry and witty essay, In Search Of The Consolations of Age, in the latest online New English Review. The curmudgeonly (but erudite) Dalrymple struggles like old Mick and like old Ian to find any consolations of old age and rests a lot of his essay on Matthew Arnold's famously bleak and one-foot-in-the-grave poem Old Age.
One ungoodly truth of old age is one's increasing reliance on medical science for life-prolonging maintenance and repairs. Here to illustrate that truism is a true story.
We have just spent a few idyllic days at the coast at Tomakin where our dynamic dog Turbo (six) enjoyed romps on the spacious sands and in the limpid shallows of a perfect beach. He was in Kelpie Heaven. Once, when his ball floated out beyond his reach, one of the mermaids basking on the nearby rocks slithered sensuously into the sea to fetch it for him.
"He's so cute!" she enthused.
"Let's move here! Let's not go back to Canberra!" a sandy-jowled Turbo begged me - not in so many words but with his excited barks and his eloquent body language.
"If only we could, dear four-legged friend," I sighed.
"But little Tomakin is remote and at my decaying age I must live somewhere, a big and sophisticated metropolis, where cardiologists, rheumatologists, gerontologists, gastroenterologists, ethnomusicologists, Egyptologists etc are always life-preservingly at hand."
Kelpies are famously smart and I saw Turbo's brow crease with puzzlement when I, having a gerontoconfused senior ramble, included ethnomusicologists and Egyptologists in my list of medical specialists.
"What is it to grow old?" asks Matthew Arnold in the first line of his desolately miserable poem Growing Old.
"Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?"
Yes, alas, it is. My form was never especially glorious but for a long while it was at least presentable. Now at 80, dismayed by what I have decomposed into, I battle to try to avoid all mirrors. This is a lost battle at my gymnasium where all of the walls are mirrors (to enable the narcissistic, bodybuilding young to fall in love with their reflections) and where in mirrors I catch dismaying glimpses of a lycra-clad scarecrow (it is me) shuffling from one apparatus to another.
Another burden of old age is the realisation of how little we have achieved in our now rapidly evaporating lifetimes. By my age Mozart (1756-1791) had been dead for 45 years but in his brief lifetime had composed more than 800 works, including 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos and 22 operas.
Perhaps Sir Mick's senior dismay has to do with him noticing signs of senility in his ways. Certainly I notice some in mine, in things like now confusing an Egyptologist with a podiatrist and occasionally, dressing in the mornings, putting my trousers on back-to-front (and every now and then inside-out as well).
But wait! Nil desperandum!
Back to Mozart. The fact that I know-remember without having to look it up exactly how many symphonies, piano concertos and operas Mozart wrote must surely say something about the for now senility-resistant and nimble state of my brain.
And the fact that listening to those operas (and watching them too thanks to YouTube) gives me great joy indicates that my brain's amygdala (the department of the brain that processes and entertains emotions) is still a cerebral spring chicken.
Life can seem meaninglessly absurd and brief and it can be difficult to know quite how to live out one's dwindling, twilight years.
But I do like the meaning-of-life advice that Walter Pater gives in his monumental study of the Renaissance. He invites us in our short lives to wallow in the decadence of the intense pleasures the fine arts at their finest can give us.
He advises us that "Only a counted number of pulses is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. Our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time."
Back to Mozart, then, and to how earlier this week I indulged myself in the decadent pleasure of watching on YouTube a fine performance of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. Did I watch it while wearing my trousers back-to-front? Perhaps. But so what?
Set and sung to music at its most sparklingly beautiful, that opera is a delightful saga of love and reason triumphing (with the help of lots of magic) over hate and ignorance. What a happy escape from our own current times in which hate, ignorance and idiocy reign supreme.
So it was no wonder that, as usual when Mozart-immersed, I found my pulses quickening and multiplying exponentially during the given time - the two hours and 10 minutes of the sparklingly uplifting opera followed by hours of the therapeutic afterglow it leaves.
Blessed are the octogenarian pulse counters - for they shall (for a little while, while they are busy counting) forget the gloomily difficult business of trying to think of anything good about growing old.
