AS OLD AS YOU FEEL ?..

As I`m now well into my 75th year I`ve started to wonder how I`m supposed to feel at my age.   I look around and some people I see appear to be `old` but in fact they might be the same age as me.   On the other hand, there may well be people who look at me and think, "Look at him - he must be well into his `70s."   So in answering the question as to how old I feel, I guess there is quite a lot of room for self delusion, especially when considering one`s physical appearance.

But it`s the mental age that interests me.   The older I get, the more things I find interesting and the more I am keen to find out about and I`m sure that having an enquiring mind is something that helps me feel that my mental age might be lagging behind my physical one.

Anyway, I discovered a way of finding out.  There are loads of websites that provide tests for you to determine what your mental age might be.  And in a desperate attempt to convince myself that I`m not yet off with the fairies, I tried a few with varying results. This one -http://yourmentalage.com/- came up with a mental age of 37 for me!!  Another suggested I was really 41 but a particularly inquisitive American site concluded that I was really 80, possibly because I didn`t understand the American questions about baseball, Fox News, Anna Nicole Smith and stuff.

So - and this is perhaps the most telling conclusion I reached - it doesn`t matter what the test results might be, neither do the perceptions of others, for I have reached the stage in life where I really don`t care about all that;  all I really know is that whatever it is that I`m supposed to feel at 74, I simply don`t.  I`m pretty sure my true mental age is about 12.