OUR attitude towards ageing has shown an astonishing change in recent years.

Iremember routinely describing people in their mid-fifties as elderly when I started reporting but would not dream of doing it now, and not simply because I'm that age myself these days.

It was a rare event to interview centenarians and most of them were gaga. Now there are so many that the Queen must be suffering from writer's cramp sending them her best wishes and plenty are very chirpy.

It's easy to make mistakes with people of this age. Once I went to call on a centenarian and as the old lady opened her door, I said: "Congratulations on your 100th birthday."

"Wait a bit," she replied. "I'll just go and get my mother."

It was a matter of astonishment just after the war when the economist John Maynard Keynes died in his sixties and both his parents attended the memorial seriice. Yet no one turned a hair recently at a golden wedding celebration in Shoreham where the guest of honour was the bride's mother - aged 98.

All my childhood, I was hoping that someone really famous would reach their century. I had high hopes of Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell but both died in their nineties. Recently it has become almost commonplace with notables such as Manny Shinwell, Irving Berlin and Lord Denning all achieving the anniversary.

Not so long ago, Brighton was holding a celebration for ex-mayors and their partners. The town went back to the Sixties and Seventies to round them all up and was somewhat surprised later to hear from one who had been missed out, dating from the mid-Twenties. She'd been a young second wife to an old mayor and was still around in her nineties.

Iremember people over 40 being considered as elderly and women often wearing black when they reached that age. Many people died before retirement and those achieving it often did not have many healthy years as pensioners.

Now people retire to places like Hove to die and forget what they came there for. Some are astonishingly lively. My mother, 80 in July, thinks nothing of hilly nine-mile walks. And only at the weekend a woman of 88 and a man one year older completed the London Marathon.

There's a real problem of how a dwindling number of youngsters is going to pay for the pensions of all these lively old things. In France, they are already thinking of upping the retirement age to 70 and it could happen here too in time.

The days of people working as little as 25 years before being paid off with tidy sums to keep them in luxury during long retirements will soon be long gone.

Despite working almost 40 years so far, I expect to keep in some kind of gainful employment for some time yet to avoid a lengthy decline spent in penury. The only consolation of being a putative old git is that if I dropped dead today, they'd say I had died young.

BRIGHTON CENTRAL LIBRARY moves to Preston Circus and Brighton and Hove Albion go to Withdean in August, both for temporary periods put at three years. What's the betting that both of them are there for at least double that time as the whole history of new projects is that none of them is ever completed in time?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.