They say 60 is the new 40 – I took that to an extreme

It’s natural to become a little more cautious as we age, and yet the “silver travel boom” suggests that plenty of people are doing everything they can to seek out new experiences, rather than retreating to the fire with slippers and pipe. A report this week from the IMF declared “the seventies are the new fifties” and that those in older age are often far more mentally and physically active; a person who is 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive ability as a 53-year-old in 2000.Things are different now and people retire with the sense of a good 20 or 30 years of life to live – learning to speak another language, backpacking and baking, ballroom dancing or finally buying that guitar and dreaming of Glastonbury.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to spend your working day doing something you love – writing, in my case – and it’s gone well on the scale of things, then it would be easy to simply, well, carry on doing just that in retirement.if(window.adverts) { window.



adverts.addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); } I was lucky. In 2005, when I was in my mid-forties, I finally discovered my writing voice and published my first historical novel.

It changed my life.This word “luck” isn’t about being falsely modest or female self-deprecation but a hard truth of publishing. A book having the wind beneath its wings is down to a whole range of factors, most of which are out of the author’s control: happenstance, writing a book that hits a zeitgeist, being in the right place at the right time.

Labyrinth was that novel for me, though it was my fifth book, so becoming an “overnight success” at the age of 44 was, frankly, lovely.At the same time, success can make you play safe. Success can make you stop pushing yourself to try new things, even more so once you are in your sixties and are being sent daily offers for “assisted living accommodation” and mobility aids.

Ironic, since I’ve been a full-time carer for the past 15 years (at different times, for my father and mother-in-law) and live hour-to-hour with intimations of mortality. What this means is that you never put yourself, your work, first without thinking of someone else. Even when I am away working – and because my husband and brother-in-law are part of the story, too, I can work – I’m still always conscious of appointments, medication, things that need to be done at a set time, rain or shine.

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addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }I’m a long way off thinking of putting down my pen – I’m not sure writers retire anyway, we just keep scribbling – but, all the same, during my fifties, caring was at the heart of things. I was publishing, and enjoying the process as much as ever.As every carer knows, your responsibilities take up as much emotional space as practical, and I couldn’t – or didn’t – push myself to try anything new.

I was simply too tired and too short of time. Not fearful, exactly, but certainly cautious of upsetting the apple cart. Everything was ticking over, everything was in balance, why risk that?But the essence of being an artist of any kind is the willingness to take risks.

You have to keep challenging yourself and be prepared to fall flat on your face, otherwise you will never discover what you are capable of. Samuel Beckett’s 1983 saying holds as true today as it ever did: “Ever tried. Ever failed.

No matter. Try again. Fail again.

Fail better.”As I turned 60, then 61, I acknowledged that sticking only with what I knew I could do, and do well, wasn’t encouraging me to stretch myself. So, when, after the Covid lockdowns in 2021, a theatre producer asked me if I had ever thought about doing a one-woman show, I leapt at the chance.

I was curious, excited and terrified too, but interested to see if I could transform myself from author into performer. Interested to discover I could learn to work with lights, music, costumes, special effects, a script..

. Old dog, new tricks and all that.Fast forward two years.

When I was waiting to go on stage for the first preview, I was literally shaking in the wings. Bones rattling, dry throat, clammy hands, I have never been so nervous before or since. I didn’t think I could go on and asked myself what the hell I thought I was doing.

But then the music started and since, in a one-woman show, there is no one else, I had no choice except to step up. And it was liberating, and exhilarating, and got a little less terrifying every night. It was also a much-needed reminder that you are never too old to try something new or push yourself.

So much so, that two years later I signed up for another back-breaking six week, 36 gig tour! When I began in Stafford it was winter, when I finished in Newcastle the trees were heavy with apple blossom and the sun was shining.if(window.adverts) { window.

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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l2"}); }#color-context-related-article-3535999 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square KATE BOTTLEY Don't be afraid of old age – it's a privilegeRead MoreOf course, most nights something went wrong – a coughing fit, the haze machine took on a life of its own and filled the auditorium with smoke, a medical emergency in the front row and a half-hour show stop in Keswick. But the joy of connection, the intimacy and the unpredictability of live performance, made every knee-trembling moment worth it.

It’s the same impulse that sends other people travelling, or running a marathon, or learning to play the piano at the age of 65. As we get older, it’s too easy to become set in our ways. We have to find ways to move forward and seek out new experiences, we need to expand our experiences (especially as we are living through such challenging times) and make the most of any opportunities that come our way.

It’s a cliché, or rather it should be, that 60 is the new 40...

This week I have been...

Revisiting...

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – in between reading my way through the brilliant longlists for both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.I first fell in love with the oddness of Holmes and his better half, Watson, in the summer of 1979 after finishing my O-levels and have come back to the stories on and off ever since, like familiar friends.This time, I realised how – despite all the talk about Baker Street and London – in fact, Conan Doyle was a country writer.

He’s happiest talking about Surrey and Sussex, about the evil lurking behind the respectable façade of English village life.Watching..

. make-over shows. Because the news is so remorseless, in the gym I’ve become addicted to watching A Place in the Sun or Escape to the Country instead.

Although you know it’s never going to work out, or the couples will change their mind and stay at home instead, it’s very comforting looking at potential holiday homes in the Algarve or Gran Canaria when you’re staggering along on the treadmill. It helps clear the mind.Walking.

.. in the countryside, whenever I can get out there.

Now it’s spring, the first blossoms are starting to come and there are battalions of daffodils lining the roadside and purple, yellow and pink crocuses.Kitted out in wellies and a raincoat, this week I escaped to the Fishbourne Marshes – a landscape I’ve walked as a child with my parents, then as a teenager trying to find her place in the world, later with my own children and now with my grandson – and let my mind roam free.No podcasts, no music, just the sound of the landscape, the curlews and the gulls.

Making the most of a rare sunny day, I also headed up into the South Downs and trampled around the old Iron Age fort, the Trundle, to look down over the incredible beauty of Sussex and Hampshire. Sky and sea for as far as the eye could see.Kate Mosse will publish her first YA book – Feminist History for Every Day of the Year – in September 2025 (Macmillan Children’s Books).