Getting old can have some benefits for your sex life, at least according to Jeremy Clarkson.
The TV presenter has written about all sorts of things during his career including the extremely high cost of running a pub, his 'victory' over Elon Musk years on from a spat over his Top Gear test of a Tesla and how he would 'solve' Gen Z.
One topic he has returned to regularly is that of health and aging, as the 64-year-old (he turns 65 tomorrow, so many happy returns on that front) has written much about his health in recent years.
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Clarkson wrote last year that he might have been 'days away' from death after struggling to move properly, with his health scare meaning he is 'not allowed to have fun anymore'.
He's occasionally expressed the view that he thinks he doesn't have long left to live, though in an interview with The Guardian last year he estimated he had about '70,000 hours left' which works out at about eight years.
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One of his most eloquent ruminations on the subject of mortality came three years ago with one of his columns for The Sunday Times where he reflected on how he was about to outlive his father.
Clarkson wrote that he thinks about dying a lot and it bothers him, but he did add that he'd discovered some up-sides to getting older, the first of which sounds like freedom from trying to look good so you can have a sex life.
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He wrote: "While ageing is mostly bad news, there are one or two nuggets if you know where to look. First of all, it simply doesn’t matter what you look like.
"As a young person you need to be attractive so that you can have sexual intercourse, which means you are forced to put stuff in your hair and wear matching socks and chancellor-style Italian trainers with gold-foil serial numbers.
"When you are an old person there is no need to do this any more, so you can have hair coming out of your nose and ears and you can wear a jumper with holes in it and slippers with zips up the front. And you can drive a Volvo and have a tartan shopping trolley.
"It’s all a blessed relief."
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The second golden nugget to ageing is the shift from having to make use of time in a busy life to reaching that glorious place of having so much free time that you need to find things to do to fill the days with.
According to Clarkson, this manifests in a number of ways including developing a newfound admiration for gardening trousers with extra pockets and an elasticated waistband, finding his new pair of secateurs 'mildly arousing' and enjoying the pleasures of going for a walk where he can see the changes in nature from the previous walk and do a spot of birdwatching.
Meanwhile, three years later Clarkson is still plodding on with a new season of Clarkson's Farm in the works and set to release next month.
He's also revisiting some of his old work alongside co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May in The Grand-ish Tour: A Trip Down Memory Lane, taking the time to call May 'senile' for not seeming to remember he'd been there to film it, though he said he has 'too many cows now to go swanning off' on trips like that again.
Topics: Jeremy Clarkson, Clarkson's Farm, The Grand Tour, Health, Celebrity
Joe Harker