I’m a walking example of that old joke – “Optimism? Yeah, I tried it once, but I knew it wouldn’t last.”

I lean towards being a miserable old git as easily and unconsciously as a goose migrates south.

I collect the gloomy stuff the way trousers collect dog hair, while the joyful stuff evaporates like summer sweat.

I know that this “My glass is half empty and I’m going to find who nicked the other half.” disposition distorts my vision like blinders on a milk horse, keeping me plodding along the same disconsolate route without being distracted by all those things that might make me smile, so I’ve taken to reading things by people who wear different blinders than me, to find out what they see.

I don’t mean the people who write self-help books on how to use visualisation and affirmations so I can self-actualise and reach my full potential or the people who want to tell me that I can have a life as successful as theirs if I only I’d focus my positive energies each morning.

I’m looking for people who can see how crap life sometimes is and how hard it is to change and who find a way not to lose themselves in apathy or despair. Hollie McNish is one of these people.

I came across her two weeks ago on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 (a new addiction of mine now that BBC Sounds lets me choose when to listen) when she was reading a poem from her new book ‘Lobster and other things I’m learning to love‘ which comes out on 14th March. Her voice is unique; frank, personal, unafraid and as able to mourn as to laugh and sometimes to combine the two. I immediately bought her last book, ‘Slug and other things I’ve been told to hate’. It’s not like other poetry books. For a start, it’s nearly 500 pages long. It’s a mix of memories, stories and poems focused by theme. Reading it is like going for coffee with someone you’ve just met but who you feel you’ve known forever: intoxicating, a little overwhelming, life-affirming. I keep coming back to what she’s said about things in her life and thinking about things in mine.

One of those things is my attitude to age. As a Miserable Old Git, it’s not surprising that my thoughts about ageing have been coloured by miserable people from Larkin’s “Life is slow dying” to Billie Crystal in “City Slickers” having a mid-life crisis, looking in the mirror and knowing that what he sees is as good as it’s going to get and it’s not so great.

I’ve grown less and less comfortable with these points of view. They’re too focused on decline and anticipated loss. Eventually, I’ll lose everything and become nothing, but not today.

So I looked to see what Hollie McNish says about ageing and found this poem:

I love the context the poem sets, reminding me that, no matter how long I live, I’ll still be young compared to the world that I live in.

Most of all, I like the inversion of age into youth, not by wrapping myself in the rags of a youth already mostly worn away but by acknowledging that this is as young as I’ll ever be. That today is the best opportunity I have to take advantage of my current ‘youth’ – until tomorrow, when I get to do it again.

Maybe there’ll come a day when I’m ready to let go and not do any of it again, ever. If that day comes, I hope I’ll have timed it right and won’t have to hang around waiting for death like it’s a behind-schedule bus.

Maybe I’ll reach my last day and still be saying, “Just give me a minute, I’ve one more thing I need to...” In which case I’ll be O.K. if I don’t get to finish the sentence.

Today, though, I’m thinking about all the things I’m still able to do, that I still have an appetite for, that I’m still curious about, that still make my pulse race or my mouth smile or my heart overflow. I’ll take those things as signs of my current youth and do what I can with them.