The UK’s oldest person has recently died, at the age of 111. For the past seventeen minutes I’ve been racking my mind thinking of reasons to live so long, and other than free bus travel and being able to make normal things looks disgustingly ugly, here is what I have come up with.

‘I’m telling you Doris, I am going to die as palindromically as I can!’

Eunice Bowman believed that she had lived a good life, but that isn’t a good enough reason to want to live for so long, is it? Here’s the real deal. Old people are either wise or entertaining. The entertaining grannies are the ones that simply won’t be quiet. Their senility is enough to pave over any attempts at polite methods of ending a conversation, forcing you to suddenly get a call on your pocketmobilegizmo informing you that your dog is in serious need of rescuing from a man with more than one screwdriver. Your eldest relative could be talking about their incestuous thoughts as a teen and even an interruption from the incest queen herself, the Queen, wouldn’t shut her up and save your sanity.

A wise elder is the quiet one. In my family, it is my Granddad. He is not quiet by choice, as he cannot get a word in edgeways with my Gran around. He has learnt to pick his words. Or so I think. I attribute all sorts of insight to his probably-dementia-induced statements. What the hell does, ‘It really rains when you think about it,’ mean anyway? The more I think about it, the more interpretations I can give to it – is this the very process he is referencing? Yet the more interpretations I give, the less sense it actually seems to make. I think my Granddad should write the third instalment of the Bible, although it would mainly be about cars.

Being old is basically a license to be embarrassing. If you’re forty and wearing clothes from twenty years ago, you are crazy. If you are eighty and wearing clothes that may as well have evolved at the same time as human beings, no one cares. If you eighty and wear anything other than such relics, you are instantly a cool oldie. Jenny Joseph may wear purple, but I will certainly be wearing an assortment of hats that are precariously glued to different sections of my saggy temple. That is, if I haven’t committed suicide by this point.

Because society is so awfully awful at the moment, and appears to be stuck in an ever-descending shit-spiral, the Good Old Days will always be Good. In this way, the majority of your memories will be objectively good ones. The best cure for regret is therefore to just wait it out, until your stories of bomb-scares are outclassed by the lack of signal on your grandchild’s iPhone.

Finally, you can have as many bad habits as you like, without fear of disapproval. Not only are they the things that define you, putting one into the class of relative defined by smoking or shouting at buses, but the negative effects do not have time to catch up with you. You can race bowel cancer and lung cancer, in the name of science, and giving your grandchildren asthma. You can drink so much that your visits to the toilet become so regular you decide to just wear nappies, therefore having a small but portable jacuzzi, redefining the concept of a ‘golden oldie’. I would abuse my brittle body so much as a senior, and there are just so many ways to go about it! It really rains when you think about it.

That is still a stupid phrase.