This is the BBC.

You're listening to Late Night Women's Hour with me, Lauren Leuven.

Here's a podcast from the archive.

It's all about ageing and features Miranda Sawyer, Ruby Hammer, Helen Small and the witty and wonderful Michelle Hansen.

Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror.

I was paralysed sometimes. Nothing inside me was ready for it.

This is Simone de Beauvoir, writing in 1970 in a book called The Coming of Age.

What she captures is the stealth of the aging process, the way it seems to creep up a line or grey hair at the time,

and the fear, paralysis, she calls it, standing in front of the mirror, who am I?

These days the world seems full of well-intentioned cat-poster sentiment designed to cheer us up about the passage of time. You're only as young as you feel, and 70 is definitely the new 40. The powerful baby boomer generation has begun to chip away at the stigma of old age, but for older women in particular, advancing age can mean a sense of invisibility.

De Beauvoir's feelings of fear and dread can't be magiced or even Botoxed away.

So tonight on Late Night Woman's Hour, we're going to provide you with a toolkit,

cultural, philosophical, emotional, sartorial for the years beyond 40.

With me in the Late Night Woman's Hour Lounge, our writer and

broadcaster Miranda Sawyer, whose midlife crisis was the starting point for a book out of time.

The cultural historian Helen Small, whose book The Long Life examines writing about aging from

Plato to the present, makeup artist and founder of the Ruby and Millie makeup range, Ruby Hammer,

and the writer and guardian columnist Michelle Hansen. Welcome one and all.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Miranda, I'm going to start with you. Your generation are, as far as

midlife is concerned, the new arrivals. So I'm keen to know how the acid house and Britpop cohort are coping with middle age.

Well, it's quite interesting because some of them just, some of us, our generation,

was kind of Generation X, I suppose, loosely, just carry on.

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