EXCUSE me for just a moment while I put this heavy dictionary back on the shelf...

Eeeerph!

I have been scouring the dictionary, in vain, for the word that describes those involuntary vocal noises you make when you get to my age, every time you have to stretch or bend.

I remember Billy Connolly, years ago, saying he had noticed he was doing it, but he had no idea when it had started.

It was funny at the time because I did it occasionally, but it’s not so funny now, when every single movement seems to be accompanied by a ‘hoooom’ or a ‘grrrerg’ or a ‘frrrew’.

It’s even more relevant at the moment because my poor wife, who usually suffers in silence, has hurt her hip and aggravated it playing tennis, so now also gives out a ‘carrripe’ or a ‘veeeech’ with every tiny motion.

I am quite an active person and relatively fit for my age, I think, yet now I cannot do the simplest physical task without my brain having to complain about it by sending a message to my voicebox.

It seems that at first you develop the noise to help you endure the effort, but it eventually becomes involuntary, almost like a reflex.

Bending down and putting on socks, for instance, which used to be achieved in complete silence, now has to come with not one but two groans, and the funny thing is: it’s always a different noise, and you never know which one will come out.

So not only are the noises beyond my control, but they are also random, making it doubly disconcerting.

You would have thought that my brain would have produced a standard response by now, and settled on a noise that comes out the same every time.

But instead it struggles to find anything suitable, so does something weird and tries to come up with a word, rather than just a grunt. And finding there are no relevant words in my vocabulary, it is forced to try to make one up, on the spur of the moment.

I dare say some people will have a swear word they always use instead, but I have always been a firm believer that swear words should be reserved for when they are really needed, like when you stub your toe or the government says it is thinking of making fox hunting legal again.

Then there are those people who deliberately make noises during exercise, when they surely don’t need to.

I am especially thinking of professional tennis players, who, in older times, played in silence, but now all seem to give out an annoying and frankly embarrassing grunt of some kind, every time they hit the ball.

As few other top sportspeople find it necessary to do the same, we can only assume that tennis players think they work harder and suffer more pain than the rest.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t watch much tennis, and even my wife, who is keen on the game, finds it annoying, especially when female tennis players feel they have to make such unladylike sounds.

Like most things concerned with getting older, it looks like we are stuck with our involuntary vocal affliction, although we have an aged aunt in our family who can only get around slowly, on sticks, but does it silently, so she gives us hope of growing out of it.

And when discussing the subject with my wife, she pointed out that we should be thankful for small mercies.

Imagine how much worse the problem would be if the involuntary noises were coming out of the other end.