Richard Hogan: Mick Jagger's hips don't lie, and neither does his attitude towards ageing

'We need to teach young girls to celebrate their bodies, and not to chase some ridiculous idea of agelessness.'

Rather than allowing marketing executives to dictate how we should feel about growing old, maybe it’s time we began celebrating when we reach old age. 

If Love Island teaches us anything, (and I’m not sure it does) the human body requires a considerable amount of upkeep. All the exercising, weight lifting, healthy eating, pruning and plucking, "cracking on," (young speak for flirting) and then there’s the inevitability of it all falling apart. You put in all this effort only for time to crumble it. Like a sandcastle built on the water’s edge, the returning tide will tear it down. Our great poet, W.B. Yeats warned us that "things fall apart." 

Time has an incredible way of humbling the most beautiful among us. There is nothing more fleeting than beauty. We all know this, and yet we fear the ageing process. In T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the voice in the poem looks into the future and all he finds are meaningless, banal acts of parting his hair, eating a peach and walking on a beach. He rather depressingly declares, "I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."