Without a doubt my 50's are turning out to be my best time of life to date. I am lucky to be blessed with good health and my business is, thankfully, the most successful it ever has been. The children have left home and I have amassed sufficient assets to feel reasonably financially secure.
I still work long hours but at a job I love and I don't skimp on the holidays. I have time to indulge in my favourite pastimes, money to enjoy the finer things in life and to help out my family when they need it, BLISS. Well it would seem so and I count my blessings.
However with this decade has come a far less tolerant attitude. I find I can't abide foul language, ingratitude, inertia and ignorant people. I also can't stand bad manners and particularly bad table manners. Eating food with your mouth open is a killer, and as for someone eating an apple or god forbid crisps near my hearing can see me going red with rage.
What is worse I have developed what I have termed menopausal Tourette's. What I mean is I find I am actually vocalising my inner thoughts, sometimes to the perpetrator and all too often to the world at large. Leaving me looking well frankly just a bit crackers!
There was one nasty occasion on the train but perhaps let's not go there. Needless to say the result of my outburst wasn't exactly overlooked by my fellow passengers who positively cheered me on but had apparently been too embarrassed to say anything themselves.
Clearly not a problem if, like me, you don't actually realise you have spoken out loud!
Of course what age also brings you is an appreciation of the little things in life that, in your younger years, just passed you by; A long hot bath with plenty of bubbles (and a glass of bubbly with it even better), being able to get lost in a great book, glancing in the mirror when all made up and ready to go and thinking "well not too bad actually", when my granddaughter recognises me on Skype from 10,000 miles away, Fridays evenings with a take away, a good bottle of red and bed by 9. Just perfect.
And, becoming just a tad sentimental, the sound of a Christmas brass band playing.
I'd like to say I am tasking myself with becoming more tolerant in 2015 but I no longer set myself impossible targets. Resolutions are for the young and inexperienced who actually believe they will keep them beyond the end of January.
Whereby those of us in our 5th decade know that that gym membership was about as useful as a chocolate fireguard and the no wine in January a complete non-starter.
The other great thing about age is it does bring a bit of the devil may care attitude with it and long may it continue. I have stopped worrying what people think about me, at anything like the rate I used to, and as Marilyn Monroe said "if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."