THEY say you start to feel old when you notice how young policemen look – but they’re wrong.

I know the precise date I first felt like that, because it was the day my son was born in 1992 – and it was all because of the doctors.

You don’t expect the day to come, quite so soon, when the person in the white coat telling you about your wife’s contractions seems to be evidence of the hospital’s radical new policy of letting school children in the maternity ward. And I was only 30 myself.

Something similar happened the other day when I had to do a talk to some primary school headteachers – about 40 of them - whom you might have expected to take donkeys’ years to reach such senior posts.

I looked for any faces in the crowd belonging to people who were definitely older than me, but the only one was somebody I had met before, and I knew he definitely is older - which would have been some consolation, apart from he doesn’t look it.

Even when I look forward to this year’s holiday, my thoughts keep coming back to how old I am and look.

You might think my wife and I are of an age when we want to go off on Saga cruises, chill out with a bottle of wine and leisurely sample local cuisine and culture.

But while it’s true that we do that sometimes, this time we will be with our son and daughter, who are at that funny age when they don’t want to go on holiday with mum and dad – unless it’s to Florida, where we will be on a whistle-stop tour of all the theme parks.

I would like to say they will be dragging me on the rollercoasters, but that would be wrong because I don’t need any dragging.

I’ve always loved fairground rides and see no sign of becoming bored by them, or getting too old to ride them.

But it means I am going to be stood in queues, looking around at the other riders and trying to spot somebody – anybody – who is older than me.

I know because I did it when we went before, four years ago, so I know I am probably going to be double the age of most of the people on those rides.

I don’t know whether this means I am young at heart or should act my age, but attitude doesn’t make any difference to how old you look.

You can find out how old that is by visiting a website called guessmyage.net which encourages people to upload pictures so other people can guess their age (don’t ask me why).

While I was debating whether to risk joining in, I tried a few guesses myself.

I am no psychologist, but I reckon most people upload pictures to that site because they imagine they look younger than they are, and probably get a shock when they find out the average guesses were that most people were younger than they appeared, not older.

You won’t find me on there, by the way, because I made at least 20 guesses and then suddenly realised that, compared with literally everybody else I saw, I was - you’ve guessed it - the oldest.

Policemen look young, doctors look young, headteachers look young. I’m scared to put my head round the door of the law courts in case the judges look young too.

At least we can look forward to a new parliament soon, when we can all feel young and in touch again, if only in comparison with the poor old souls from the House of Lords.