"Don't grow up! It's a trap!" - Insightful warning popular for youngsters' T-shirts

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Keep young and beautiful

It's your duty to be beautiful

Keep young and beautiful

If you wanna be loved.

- Sexist (but tongue-in-cheek) Hollywood movie hit song of the 1930s

You know you are getting old when your first ever pin-up (pinned up all those years ago when puberty first began to nudge you) dies of old age.

The French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died. She was 91 (coincidentally the average age of the people who write letters to the editor of The Canberra Times).

This columnist is 80 now (so in another five years I will become eligible to write letters to The Canberra Times) and when she first shimmered into my life she was a teenage "sex-kitten" starlet and I was just a pre-pubescent English urchin who didn't know what "sex-kitten" meant.

There is a famous saying that we know we are getting old when we begin to notice police officers getting younger and younger. Perhaps an even more shirtfronting proof of one's ageing is the appointment of younger and younger popes.

For all of my life, until last year's election of young Pope Leo XIV (he was 69 then and is 70 today and so is still far too young to feel a senile itch to write letters), popes seemed impossibly, almost medievally, ancient and fossil-doddery and to have one foot in the grave. Now, suddenly, unnervingly, Christendom is blessed with a pope who is a boyish 10 years younger than I am and who from the look and sound of him might give me a run for my money in a triathlon and who might have marbles enough (in spite of his major delusion of his beliefs in religious nonsense) to complete cryptic crosswords almost........

© Canberra Times