Preparing for old age is always going to be too little too late.

The things you have to do to give yourself a decent chance of a good old age are well-known by all of us. You need to eat well, exercise a bit and stay away from drugs (yes, alcohol counts) and other stuff that’s obviously bad for you. You need to fix things when they break in your body, and that includes teeth: an astonishing amount of bacterial infections can be mouth-related.

Whether you’re a man or a woman, you need to stay away from violent men who will hurt you all too readily. There are lots of violent men, everywhere.

Men need to manage their tendency to take fatal risks, to drive cars too fast, to run those red lights. Without intervention, more baby boys are born than girls but by the time they reach twenty those numbers have balance out. Boys die in greater numbers.

Men should work at building meaningful relationships, friendships, community, family. Being connected helps mental health and an extraordinary number of men kill themselves. It is the largest cause of death unto the age of fifty-five.

If health and longevity was a woman’s only aim, she’d probably avoid men entirely – too dangerous, too needy.

If we could choose such things, then being born wealthy obviously helps. Nothing kills quite as consistently as poverty.

The fundamental problem with almost of all of this, is that the things that you could do, have to be done from your early adult life and no one in their twenties believes that they will ever die. Not them.

By the time you’re approaching sixty and can actually start to see the shape of your old age, it’s too late for a lot of things that will make a difference. Stopping smoking helps at any age of course, but by then your chances of cancer or emphysema are high.

Losing weight will helps with arthritis but it will take years of improved roughage to sort out those bowel problems and by the time you’re approaching sixty, keeping regular is something people talk about all too often.

Growing old is not for wimps.

But dying young isn’t such a great alternative.

So eat your greens young man, and pray that some poor unsuspecting woman will adopt you into her life.