As the alcoholic haze of Christmas begins to clear, and yet another New Year looms, I fear it may be time for me to confront one or two uncomfortable truths about the indignities of growing older.
Some readers will have experienced them already, while for others they lie far in the future. But, believe me, very few will escape them altogether as the years roll mercilessly by.
So far, I have to admit, I've been extraordinarily lucky, having reached the age of 71 in pretty robust health. I've been much luckier, anyway, than I deserve to be after smoking and drinking heavily for more than 50 years, and paying not the slightest attention to any official advice on healthy eating or the benefits of regular exercise.
I haven't been in a hospital bed since I was 15 (and that was for nothing more serious than ingrown toenails), while on average I took no more than one day off sick in every ten years of my full-time working career.
By contrast, many non-smoking gym-goers, much younger than me - particularly those on the public payroll - seem to spend half their lives on the sick, apparently suffering not only from physical ailments but from constant trouble with their mental health, poor dears.
Until very recently, I attributed my own resilient health to two main factors, although I cannot stress too strongly that, whatever you do, you mustn't be guided by me.
Factor number one was my adored late mother's almost complete disregard for hygiene in my childhood. A member of the wartime generation, who never forgot the privations of 1939-45, she wouldn't turn a hair if one of us accidentally dropped the sausages into the cat-litter tray. She would just dust them off and serve them up to her four children as if nothing untoward had happened.
Nor would she judge that the butter had gone off until she could hear it humming from the next room (OK, I exaggerate a little, but not much).
Enough to say that as I was growing up, I was exposed to all sorts of bacteria, from which most children are protected these days, and I always reckoned that this worked wonders in building up my immune system for later life.
My other explanation of my physical and mental wellbeing was my lifelong policy of steering well clear of all medical practitioners and taking no drugs (nicotine and alcohol aside) apart from a very occasional aspirin.
Medical treatment, I thought, was just as likely to do me harm as good - or so it appeared from the experience of too many friends whom I'd seen debilitated by chemotherapy or suffering miserable side-effects from the pills they'd been told to take.
For that reason, I've seen my GP only twice since I moved into our present house in the late 1980s, and I haven't been to a dentist for almost 30 years.
Just lately, however, I've come to realise that I may not have stumbled on the secrets of eternal fitness after all.
One clue was that both my elder brother and one of my two younger sisters recently suffered serious illnesses - in my brother's case, several. Yet there are very few years between us, and we all experienced exactly the same upbringing.
So bang went my theory that our mother's cavalier attitude towards germs was a guarantee of lifelong health.
As for avoiding doctors, I have to admit that my siblings would almost certainly be dead by now if it hadn't been for the good old NHS.
I must also acknowledge that I myself experienced the benefits of medical help six years ago when I last saw my GP. I'd been forced at gunpoint to the surgery by Mrs U after she became worried about a rash on my leg and fed up with my moaning about constantly having to get up in the night to answer the call of nature.
The rash seemed to cure itself, but thanks to the doctors at King's College Hospital, I now take magical pills every day which seem to have solved the problem of my enlarged prostate entirely. My only reservation is that their principal side-effects are mildly distressing.
It's much too embarrassing to say what these are in this column, but other men of a certain age who have to take tamsulosin and finasteride will know what I mean—and so too will the women in their lives!
Otherwise, I have almost nothing to complain about. But as I look ahead to Wednesday, I have a horrible feeling that 2025 will be the year when the chickens come home to roost and the infirmities of old age start to catch up with me in earnest.
Already the signs are multiplying. Not only am I becoming increasingly forgetful, but I can no longer kid myself that there's something wrong with the volume controls on the radio and TV or that my wife speaks unnaturally quietly.
Nor can I go on telling myself that she must have a bat's sense of hearing when she tells me: 'Come on, darling, think of the neighbours. You must stop the dog yapping in the garden.'
'What do you mean?' I ask her. 'I can't hear her.'
'Well, everyone else in the street can!'
No, I'll just have to face it. I'm becoming as deaf as a post, and it’s high time I did something about it.
More hurtful still to my vanity is the state of my teeth. These were never my best feature—my yellowy-brown smile has long terrified small children—but lately they’ve rotted so badly that they’ve begun to fall out.
I’m afraid the warnings on my cigarette packets that smoking damages the teeth and gums are proving all too true.
So it is that I’ve made two resolutions for the New Year.
No, I’m not going to commit to cutting down on smoking or drinking because I know from long experience that I’d renege on any such undertakings within a maximum of three days.
But I hereby resolve that in 2025 I will at last get myself kitted out with a hearing aid, no matter how old this will make me feel.
Furthermore, for the first time since the 1990s I will go to the dentist—even at the risk of making him faint when I open my mouth—and ask him to fit me with false teeth to fill those embarrassing gaps.
But these are gloomy thoughts for the festive season. I’ve hugely enjoyed my life so far and, ageing though I may be, I mean to go on doing so, come what may.
If you’ll take my advice, you’ll accept whatever life throws at you in 2025 and make the best of it. Just don’t, on any account, model your fitness regimes on the one I have followed until now!
With that, I wish all my readers a very happy - and healthy - New Year.