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.

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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........

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