The very thought of our elders getting it on is off-putting in the extreme. Repugnant, even. Believing, as we unthinkingly do, that sex is the province of young people alone, we view any evidence of coital goings-on in our parents’ – or, gasp, grandparents’! – generation as cringe-worthy.

Let’s face it, when bedecked with dewy youth’s benefits, the inner visions of anyone old – and that’s anyone over thirty when we are in our teens – lustfully engaged is analogous to the mating of Egyptian mummies. When my own parental embarrassments, then in their forties, popped out their youngest, the act under advisement struck me as more akin to necrophilia than anything healthy and genuinely sexy. Visions of WD40, lard, Natron and possible Divine Intervention – all revealing a woefully-poor grasp of biology and a correspondingly dire one of Theology! – nearly unscrambled my almost-sixteen-year-old-mind.

All the books I read at that blessedly innocent and virginal time of my life were, frankly, neither use nor ornament: What with sex before marriage being one of the many Paths to Hell; libido apparently evaporating as one got older – and images of older women looking like Ursula Andress/Ayesha’s ghastly withering in 1965 film ‘She’, I did wonder, briefly, how the human race had lasted as long as it had.

Now? I am old myself, far older than the parental pair were when they hatched Sprog Five – and I will confess that I simply cannot understand why this myth regarding age and sexual aridity has become so widespread.

It is a particularly pernicious piece of poppy-cock, this one, because it can give rise to years, if not decades, of profound terror in women’s minds as they wait for their bits to dry up, drop off, subside and become about as enticing as the dust collecting in a hoover.

Old Wives’ Tales do not always get it right, you know! I shudder to think of the thousands of women who writhe and weep in traumatised horror throughout the delights of the menopause, under the assumption that their desire for a bit of jolly rogering will go the same way as their fertility – and that the rest of their lives will be spent as erotic also-rans in the great race towards horizontal pleasure.

Rot! Rubbish! Raucously wrong! ‘Age,’ – as Shakespeare had it in describing Cleopatra  – ‘shall not wither her, nor custom stale…’

I am sixty-one – and currently, as the euphemism goes, ‘between men’ (from choice) – but, I am damned if I am going to allow my chronological years, or the world’s tabloid-generated dreary societal mores, to dictate what I can, or cannot, do with my body, my sexuality, my life.

Age and sex! Go for it, I say! Enjoy the very real boon conferred by loss of inner eggs! Get roistering and rollicking in the sure knowledge that the kids have now buggered off (and are, no doubt, making the beast with two backs in their own abodes) – and, in many cases, the day job (as opposed to being on the job!) is now but a far-distant memory!

Sex and age: a natural pairing. After all, the finest wines turn into unheard-of nectarous ecstasy when allowed to mature!