WHEN people say, “you know you’re getting old when...” – well, with me it’s when I read the birthday tributes in On This Day in The Press.

My teenage crush, Kirk Douglas, he of the dimpled chin and “I’m Spartacus” fame, is 98 – how can that be?

Truth is, we never realised the heart-throbs of our youth, Kirk, Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, were all approaching middle age. We wouldn’t have given Harry Styles and the rest of the children in One Direction a second glance. We swooned over 40-something Frank Sinatra, who would have been 100 next year.

My daughter’s teenage crush, Donny Osmond, is 57 and Sir Geoff Hurst, who thrilled the country with his hat-trick in the World Cup, is 73. Can it really be 48 years ago?

Dame Judi Dench is 80. I lived just down the road from her when I was a child and her father was our family doctor.

The thing that puzzles me, though, is how have they all got so old when I’m only 39?

Cynthia Glasby, Southfields Road, Strensall, York.