What's your age again?

I'm pretty sure I'm always going to be 34. Also this issue – sunny garden games, an al fresco restaurant for people-watching and some hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists. Woop!

I went to M&S this weekend with my mum and we both came away with the same pair of jeans. For context, she is 78 and I am 44. I wasn’t horrified, if that’s what you’re thinking. My mum is definitely more fashionable than me and has way more energy than I do.

It runs in her family. A few weeks ago I visited her 83 year-old sister – my auntie – and she showed up to Pizza Express looking ridiculously cool in Doc Martins. She talked about who she was following on TikTok and checked her messages on her Apple watch. She’s a great-grandmother. It’s not exactly the stereotype we’re fed, is it?

I love it. When I was young, I thought that ageing was the enemy. I even wrote a book about it. Life experience has taught me that getting older is a privilege. And when I look at my mum and my auntie, I’m reminded that there is no cut-off for being cool, tech savvy or cheerful. There is no D-Day. You’re younger today than you’ll ever be again.

Katherine Ryan has just launched a great new podcast called What’s my Age Again?, where interviewees like Bryony Gordon and Adam Buxton take a blood test to get an accurate idea of their biological ages (as opposed to their chronological ages). I have no idea what mine would throw up – but I do know what age I still feel mentally and it’s nowhere near 44, because 44 is for grown ups, and I am not one.

If I am ever having a wobble (usually when I look in the mirror after I’ve had more than two glasses of wine the night before), I think about that song, Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen and those brilliant lyrics that are as true now as they were when I first heard them in my twenties.

“Trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back
At photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now
How much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked”

So, I want to know – how old are you, and how old do you feel? Pop it in the comments!