28th June 2026

Today I turned 60.

There. I’ve said it. In public. Without whispering, apologising, or immediately adding that I still feel 37 inside, except when standing up from a low chair, at which point I feel approximately 104 and recently excavated.

To mark this momentous transition into my seventh decade, I am currently halfway through a very quiet, sedate, elderly cruise around the Norwegian Fjords. Nothing says “new chapter” quite like floating past vast glacial cliffs while a polite man in deck shoes explains the afternoon cake schedule.

It is, I must say, spectacularly beautiful. The fjords are dramatic, majestic, ancient and carved by immense natural forces over thousands of years, which feels appropriate because so, increasingly, is my face.

I had imagined turning 60 might involve some grand emotional reckoning. A dramatic staring-out-to-sea moment. A woman on the brink of reinvention. A bold declaration that life begins now. Instead, I found myself saying, “Ooh, they’ve got decent handrails on this ship,” with genuine enthusiasm.

And perhaps that is the real revelation.

At 60, adventure does not disappear. It simply develops a preference for comfortable shoes, accessible toilets and knowing exactly what time dinner is.

This blog, then, is intended to chart my new adventures. I use the word “adventures” broadly. There may be mountain roads, foreign cities, questionable decisions and encounters with wildlife. There may also be reviews of thermal vests, the moral complexity of buffet etiquette, and the increasingly high-stakes business of remembering why I walked into a room.

I am not becoming old. I am entering my era of strategic energy management.

There is a difference.

Youth wastes its strength on nightclubs, poor romantic decisions and sleeping on floors. Age, properly handled, is much more efficient. One learns to ask the important questions early. Is there a lift? Will there be chairs? How far is “a short walk” in real measurements? Is this coffee, or has someone merely shown hot water a photograph of a coffee bean?

Turning 60 also comes with certain social privileges. I can now make mildly inappropriate remarks and hope people describe me as “spirited.” I can complain about music in restaurants with the authority of a cultural critic. I can look at younger people queueing badly and feel not irritation, exactly, but the calm despair of a civilisation in decline.

Most importantly, I can stop pretending to be impressed by things I do not like.

Tiny portions on enormous plates? No.

Experimental seating? Absolutely not.

A hotel room where the bathroom has frosted glass walls because someone in design school confused intimacy with admin? Put it back.

So here I am, newly 60, sailing through Norway on a ship so peaceful that the most dramatic event today was a queue forming slightly earlier than expected for soup.

And yet, in its own way, this feels like the perfect beginning.

The fjords are a reminder that being shaped by time is not the same as being diminished by it. Some things become more interesting because of weathering, pressure, depth and the occasional crack. I am choosing to believe this applies equally to landscapes and women who now make a noise when getting off the sofa.

So welcome to this new chapter.

There will be travel. There will be observations. There will be sardonic reflections on ageing, reinvention, and the many small indignities of discovering that your knees now have opinions.

I have turned 60.

I am not fading quietly into the background.

I am simply checking the gradient first.